John Payne Todd died of typhoid fever in Washington, D.C., on January 16, 1852, a few weeks before his sixtieth birthday. His death followed his mother Dolley Madison's by about two and a half years. His later life had been marked by debt, gambling, and repeated dependence on his parents, but those difficulties are not a substitute for the documented immediate cause. The consulted biography identifies typhoid without supplying a full clinical course, treatment schedule, or precise duration of the final fever. His father and infant brother had died of yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793, a separate epidemic and a different disease from his own final illness. Todd was buried in Congressional Cemetery. His will called for the freedom of people he enslaved, although debts delayed implementation and the Taylor family had to petition the estate's administrator. The medical event and its legal aftermath are thus documented, while his final private exchanges remain unknown.