The Untimely Death of Dana Sleeth

Dana Sleeth died on April 6, 1936. He was 50 some years old. Bizarre, eh? For the 1930s, 50 seems like a young time to die. His father and mother lived into their 70s. Strangely enough, they all died with in three years of each other-- his dad Asa died in 1935, Dana died in 1936, and his mother Mattie died in 1937.
The other strange thing about this kind of historical work is that it's easy to create situations in your head that fully explain the data you have on hand. But then if you add just one more variable, your explanation is so far off, it's almost laughable.
This is how our explanation of Dana's death played out:
First, we had the young age and no explanation.
Then we found a page or two written by his daughter talking about Dana's love to drink. She said that he drank often, occasionally over-doing it. (which, given that it was Prohibition era, makes sense.)
Aha! we though. He was an alcoholic, and probably shot his liver. Death=explained.
But how boring. Entirely pedestrian.
And then we found a letter from his friend, Homer Bone, asking why he was in the Portland sanitarium, dated the day before he died. This was shortly followed by a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt, thanking him for the nice things he wrote about her in his recent column. This was dated a day or two after he died. So he never received the letter. Isn't that awful? I would be so bummed if Eleanor Roosevelt wrote me a letter that I never received. I mean, along with being bummed about being dead.
And then we found his obituary. Turns out, he was drawing a bath of (scalding) hot water, fell in, and was burned so badly, he died a few days later.
So now these questions remain:
Could you really get bath water that hot back in the 1930s?
How on earth do you fall into the bath? Was he drunk at the time?
How did they treat burns like that back then? How bad were the burns?
Unless we come across more letters from his kids or wife, I doubt we'll ever know the answer.
What a bizarre way to die. At least it's more interesting that liver failure or something.
Edited to add: We've now found that Dana had written several newspaper columns discussing the danger of slipping in hot baths. Poor guy! He didn't even take his own advice!