Literary Last Words

"Come, come, no weakness; let’s be a man to the last!"
- Lord Byron

Byron was attended by two young doctors on his death bed in Missolonghi. Faced with the terrible problem of treating a world-famous figure for an illness which neither knew anything about, they fell back on the usual treatment of the time – to bleed the patient and so reduce his fever. Byron resisted, saying that there had been 'more deaths by lancet than by the lance', but gave in when warned that the disease could ‘deprive him of reason'. The weakened poet sank into unconsciousness and died under his terrified doctors' hands. After the autopsy the doctors blamed each other for the death

The Guardian offers more of these morose tidbits, here.