How Did Isaac Newton Die?

Newton's last years were, by most accounts, comfortable rather than active. He had retired from his position at the Royal Mint in 1725, two years before his death, after his health began to decline noticeably. He suffered from kidney stones and incontinence and found it increasingly difficult to travel or to sustain the kind of sustained concentration that had characterised his working life. He moved to Kensington, then considered a healthful distance from London's air, to be managed by his niece Catherine Conduitt and her husband John.

He remained mentally sharp into his eighties, continuing to revise editions of his major works and engaging in correspondence. He attended meetings of the Royal Society, of which he had been President since 1703, though less frequently as his health declined. In early 1727 he chaired his last Royal Society meeting. By March he was confined to bed.

He died on 20 March 1727, apparently in his sleep, having spent his final days in considerable pain from his kidney condition. Contemporary accounts note that he refused opiates which were available and offered to the end. He died as he had lived: on his own terms, without much apparent concession to comfort.

His physicians recorded kidney stones and bladder disease as the primary cause, with gout as a complicating factor. These conditions were consistent with his symptoms over the preceding years and with what post-mortem examination revealed. Kidney stones caused extraordinary suffering in the 18th century before effective anaesthesia, before surgical intervention of any reliability and Newton had endured them for some years before his death.

The gout is worth noting separately: Newton suffered from it for decades, and it is consistent with the kind of diet rich in animal protein, low in what we would now consider fresh food that wealthy men of his era tended to eat. He also, for much of his life, drank very little water. Neither fact helped.

His death was not unexpected. He had been declining for two years and had put his affairs in order. He left a substantial estate around £30,000, equivalent to several million pounds today distributed among the children of his half-siblings, to whom he remained close. He left no will, which caused some administrative difficulty, but his intentions were apparently well understood by those around him.

Newton was buried in Westminster Abbey on 28 March 1727, eight days after his death. The funeral was attended by the Lord Chancellor, two dukes, and three earls an extraordinary assembly for a man born on a Lincolnshire farm to a family of minor gentry, a man who had been premature at birth and not expected to survive infancy.

He was the first scientist to be buried in Westminster Abbey with the full honours typically accorded to heads of state and senior nobility. Voltaire, who was in London at the time, attended and was moved enough to write about it using Newton's reception as an argument for the superiority of English culture over French. The French had never buried a mathematician in quite that style.

His tomb bears a Latin inscription noting his contributions to mathematics, philosophy, and nature, and ends with the words: 'Let Mortals rejoice That there has existed such and so great an Ornament of the Human Race.' His monument, in the nave, features a reclining Newton with a globe and putti representing his major discoveries. It is an elaborate monument for a man who, by most accounts, actively disliked elaborate displays of any kind.