Robert Treat Paine was a lawyer, politician and Founding Father of the U.S. who signed the Continental Association and Declaration of Independence as a representative of Massachusetts. He last served as a justice of the State Supreme Court from 1790 to 1804 when he retired. He was Massachusetts Attorney General from 1777 to 1790 and prosecuted the treason trials following Shays' Rebellion. From 1777 to 1785, his acting Attorney General was Benjamin Kent. In 1780, he was a charter member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Paine died at age 83 in 1814 and was buried in Boston's Granary Burying Ground. Many of his papers, including correspondence and legal notes, are now held by the Massachusetts Historical Society. Paine was a Congregationalist and a devout Christian. When his church, the First Church in Boston, moved into Unitarianism, Paine followed that path. The available biographical account does not describe a continuous final medical course. It gives no dependable sequence of treatment and last symptoms from which to reconstruct a more detailed bedside narrative.