Chasing it down, I found this. It wasn’t stomach cancer, and may or may not have been an aneurism, but it’s more complicated than either:
From the book “How Did They Die?” by Norman & Betty Donaldson, 1980 :
" The US authority on wild edible food began his career in sheer desperation
in the 1920s. His family had moved to New Mexico where his father was forced to
leave them to find work. When the food supply was down to a few pinto beans,
Euell took a knapsack up into the mountains and returned with it full of
puffball mushrooms, pinon nuts and the fruits of the yellow prickly pear.The
family survived for a month wholly on what he provided.
Over the years Euell ranged from cowboy to beachcomber, once living
exclusively on wild food for five years. When he was in his 50s a literary
agent persuaded him to write his first book “Stalking The Wild Asparagus”, and
during the next ten years he published six books on the subjext he knew so
well. He warned amateurs to shun mushrooms and start with " raccoon pie and
cattail salad-they never hurt anyone."
He indignantly denied that wild foods had caused the ulcer he developed in
1974, blaming it instead on the many aspirin he had taken to relieve arthritis.
Late on December 29, 1975 he was rushed from his farnhouse in Beavertown,PA,
where he lived with his wife Freda, to the Sunbury Community Hospital. Upon
arrival he was pronounced dead of a heart attack."
