[lbo-talk] The Murder of Tycho Brahe

[Andy]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

I'd always heard that it was a duel.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#Tycho.27s_nose>

-- 
Andy