Dying on the toilet isn’t the most dignified way to go, and though Elizabethan poet and dramatist Sir Fulke Greville managed to avoid that fate, the toilet certainly played a part in his death. Greville’s disgruntled servant, Ralph Hayward, stabbed his master in the stomach while helping him fasten his trousers after using the toilet. Physicians filled his wounds with animal fat—but instead of healing the injury, the fat rotted over the next few weeks, and Greville died of gangrene on September 30, 1628. Maybe being quickly killed on the toilet would have been better.