Last trip to the loo

One of the digitization projects I have been working on since the summer is the 1894-1896 Coroner Reports for Greenville County. I have a fantastic volunteer that assists with transcription. To keep the morbid material a bit lighter, the running question each week is: " Did you learn any new or interesting ways to die in Greenville?" For the most part the cause of death is not unexpected (i.e. infant mortality and disease). Occasionally though, someone departs this mortal life in a memorable way.

Peter King apparently had been ill for some time. He bought "medicine" from a peddler and it tasted so bad that, according to a few testimonies, he would take hold of the mantle and "shake all over." The day of his death a neighbor needed to borrow a skillet, but instead found him "lying dead in the water closet." Despite the snake oil medicine, the autopsy revealed somewhat anticlimatically that he had died of heart disease. I still want to know what was in that medicine bottle...