How did Thomas Jefferson die?
Thomas Jefferson’s cause of death has not ever been conclusively determined. He wrote in January 1826, “As to the state of my health…it is now 3. weeks since a re-ascerbation of my painful complaint [a severe attack of diarrhea and difficulty urinating] has confined me to the house and indeed my couch. Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty. Yesterday for the first time I was able to leave the house and to resume a posture which enables me to begin to answer letters which have been accumulating.” Jefferson lived to the ripe old age of 83, but his health had been declining since 1818, when he visited Warm Springs, Virginia, to find relief for his rheumatism in the mineral baths. By some means, he contracted a nasty infection on his buttocks. This boil on his “seat” was probably more than furunculosis. Dr. Gordon Jones thinks it likely Jefferson developed a true septicemia, which would explain Jefferson’s subsequent “prostration.” Heavy doses of sulphur
