Jeremy Clarke: ‘Can you part your cheeks a bit?’ I did so. There was a stunned silence

Sir Francis Drake died of dysentery while attacking the town of San Juan in Puerto Rico. He was buried at sea in a lead coffin. Henry V succumbed to it at 35. Accounts of the African missionary explorer David Livingstone’s lingering death from dysentery make grim reading. Near the end he was too weak to hold a pencil.