[lbo-talk] The Murder of Tycho Brahe

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Jan 16 11:38:59 PST 2009


On Wed, 16 Jan 2009, Der Spiegel was quoted as saying:


> Over 400 years after the death of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe,
> scientists in Prague are preparing to exhume his body. Was Europe's most
> renowned scholar poisoned with mercury? A Danish scholar claims to have
> decoded the murderer's diary.

The man famously lost his nose to syphilis, and mercury was one of the most common treatments for syphilis at the time, so unless this "decoding" is an actual cipher saying X did me in, this sounds like it's going to be a pretty hard case to make.

Michael



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