Great People Of History Who Died On The Toilet

You're a legendary general, the leader of a vast empire, or a groundbreaking artist. That's the good news. Bad news: You are subject to the same cruel fate as everyone else, which means you have a not-zero chance of spending your last breath on the crapper and getting snickered at by your lessers.

It's happened enough to be notable — or maybe not, considering that humans will spend the equivalent of 92 days on the john in their lifetime (via The Scotsman). That's a quarter of one of your precious few years spent doing nothing but evacuation. When you consider that a CDC report found that 234,000 people went to the emergency room in 2008 after an incident in the bathroom (per ABC News), perhaps the question should be why more people don't die on the toilet.

Here are some of the figures of history who met nature's cruelest end. Don't titter too loudly — you never know if the same fate may befall you.

King George II was by no means the first English king to die on the toilet, at least according to some accounts. King Edmund II of England was known as Edmund Ironside because of his fierce resistance to the Danish invaders in the early 11th century (per Britannica). But legend has it he also died with iron in his side — when he was assassinated on the toilet.

The story goes that during a time of intense power struggles — the country had been split in two, with the Danish leader Canute ruling England north of the Thames — Edmund died suddenly on November 30, 1016, when he was still in his 20s. In "Historia Anglorum," the history of England written by Henry of Huntingdon that was first published in 1129, the cause of death listed is the worst assassination imaginable (via History of Yesterday). "[Having] occasion to retire to the house for relieving the call of nature," Henry wrote, "[Edmund's brother-in-law], by his father's contrivance, concealed himself in the pit, and stabbed the king twice from beneath with a sharp dagger, and, leaving the weapon fixed in his bowels, made his escape." Other versions have an arrow firing from the pit into Edmund's bowels, or say that his attendants "drove an iron hook into his posteriors," but the common thread of the story has someone hiding in a latrine pit, which is super gross.

This account is disputed, and historians today believe that Edmund likely died of natural causes, possibly from injury in an earlier battle. But with the toilet making an appearance in so many stories, perhaps even this natural death occurred in the WC.

Arius was an Alexandrian priest who theorized a different conception of Jesus' divinity than the early Christian Church would come to believe and thus was labeled a heretic, according to Britannica. He essentially believed that Jesus was not the same as God but created by God; this put him in contrast with religious leaders of the day, who believed that the Holy Trinity were three parts of one whole. Arius' writings were enormously controversial and important to the development of Christian theology (today, Jehovah's Witnesses and Unitarians are considered Arianist). But then he died on the crapper. Allegedly.

The story is this: After Arius was excommunicated by the church, he went to Constantinople to petition the emperor. Constantine allowed Arius to rejoin the church, but when Arius was wandering the streets of the city afterward, he was suddenly struck by the desire to take a dump. He went into a water closet and suddenly "falling face first, he burst in the middle," according to his contemporary Athanasius in his "Letter to Serapion" (via Oxford Academic). But note that historians aren't sure how true this account is — his death is the same as Judas' in Acts of the Apostles, and it was certainly a convenient story for Arius' enemies, who were convinced that God had intervened to make sure Arius couldn't take Eucharist.