Uncovering Tycho Brahe's Death: A Mystery Unsolved?

[kevinnn]

My professor has been driving the class nuts by not telling us how Tycho Brahe really died. I'm having trouble with the internet because the sites I have looked at tell me exactly what my teacher tells us there is more to. Does anyone have a good link or the story of how Tycho really died? Thanks.

 

[phyzguy]

The Wikipedia link gives a nice summary of some of the possibilities. We'll probably never know for sure about something that happened 4 centuries ago.

 

[HallsofIvy]

One of the remarkable things about the internet is that you can look up anything! Googling on "Tycho Brahe" "biography" gave a number of hits, including
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Brahe.html
where we see
"Although popular legend holds that Brahe died from uraemia and complications due to a ruptured bladder following too large a meal, recent research (Pallon 1996) points to mercury poisoning as the more probable cause. Following Brahe's death, Kepler obtained possession of Brahe's observations, and devoted himself to analyzing them. Brahe is reported to have written his own epitaph: 'He lived like a sage and died like a fool' "