On this date in 1992, a Kentucky medical examiner publicly announced that President Zachary Taylor had indeed died of natural causes, and not of arsenic poison. On July 4, 1850, President Taylor became ill after participating in a groundbreaking ceremony for the Washington Monument. Five days later, the President was dead apparently from gastroenteritis. In 1991, after a historian convinced a Taylor descendant that the President had not died of natural causes but had been poisoned, his body was exhumed and tests were performed on hair and nail samples from the remains. The results: the levels were several hundred times lower than they would have been had the President been poisoned with arsenic.

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