section_path: Death
section_name: Death
paragraph_text: Death
  
  In April 1879 Maxwell began to have difficulty in swallowing, the first symptom of his fatal illness.
  
  Maxwell died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48. His mother had died at the same age of the same type of cancer. The minister who regularly visited him in his last weeks was astonished at his lucidity and the immense power and scope of his memory, but comments more particularly,
  
  ... his illness drew out the whole heart and soul and spirit of the man: his firm and undoubting faith in the Incarnation and all its results; in the full sufficiency of the Atonement; in the work of the Holy Spirit. He had gauged and fathomed all the schemes and systems of philosophy, and had found them utterly empty and unsatisfying—"unworkable" was his own word about them—and he turned with simple faith to the Gospel of the Saviour.
  
  As death approached Maxwell told a Cambridge colleague,
  
  I have been thinking how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never had a violent shove all my life. The only desire which I can have is like David to serve my own generation by the will of God, and then fall asleep.
  
  Maxwell is buried at Parton Kirk, near Castle Douglas in Galloway close to where he grew up. The extended biography The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by his former schoolfellow and lifelong friend Professor Lewis Campbell, was published in 1882. His collected works were issued in two volumes by the Cambridge University Press in 1890.
  
  The executors of Maxwell's estate were his physician George Edward Paget, G. G. Stokes, and Colin Mackenzie, who was Maxwell's cousin. Overburdened with work, Stokes passed Maxwell's papers to William Garnett, who had effective custody of the papers until about 1884.
  
  There is a memorial inscription to him near the choir screen at Westminster Abbey.