Later Years

Alcott suffered chronic health problems in her later years, including vertigo. She and her earliest biographers^[attributed her illness and death to mercury poisoning. During her American Civil War service, Alcott contracted typhoid fever and was treated with a compound containing mercury. Recent analysis of Alcott's illness, however, suggests that her chronic health problems may have been associated with an autoimmune disease, not mercury exposure. Moreover, a late portrait of Alcott shows a rash on her cheeks, which is a characteristic of lupus.

Alcott died of a stroke at age 55 in Boston, on March 6, 1888, two days after her father's death. Her last words were "Is it not meningitis?" She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, near Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, on a hillside now known as "Authors' Ridge".

Louisa frequently wrote in her journals about going on runs up until she died. She challenged the social norms regarding gender by encouraging her young female readers to run as well.

Her Boston home is featured on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.