Chemistry History Lesson: From Anti-Plague Elixirs to a Precious Nose That Wasn’t

Sept. 6, 2024

Danish scientist Tycho Brahe took many of his experiments to his grave. However, researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have found clues that shed light on his mysterious work.

Seán Ottewell

Born on Dec. 14, 1546, Danish scientist Tycho Brahe is regarded by many as the greatest pre-telescope astronomer. He was also an avid astrologer and alchemist.

Unlike many other alchemists in the Middle Ages, Brahe didn’t spend time trying to turn base metals such as lead into gold. He was more interested in Swiss physician Paracelsus’s efforts to deal with diseases of the day, such as plague, syphilis and leprosy.

Brahe’s early cures for skin disease, blood infections and constipation were based on Paracelsian ingredients such as mercury and antimony.

His later anti-plague elixir was a solo effort based on theriac, a substance containing up to 60 ingredients, including herbs such as opium and a powder made from viper flesh.

Following complicated extraction, filtration and distillation steps, the resulting aqua vitae was treated with sulfates of copper or iron. After more filtration and distillation, the elixir was further enlivened with tinctures of corals, sapphire, hyacinth and drinkable gold — among many others.

As his reputation grew, in 1576, Danish King Frederik II offered Brahe the now-Swedish island of Ven.

There, the king funded construction of Uraniborg castle for Brahe, which was to become his palace, observatory and alchemical laboratory. In other words, a scientific research center, nearly half a millennium before it became the fashionable thing to do.

Middle Age Laboratory

For his lab, Brahe specified 16 ovens. These included three bath heaters, one digesting furnace with ashes, four large and two small athanors (alchemical furnaces designed to maintain a constant temperature), two furnaces for distillation in sand or ashes, and one for use with large bellows.

Another special furnace was fitted with lamps. There were two reverberatory furnaces, one of which reflected the heat directly; the other reflected it along a spiral path — as Brahe put it, “Freely and yet indirectly.”

Each oven stood in its own niche in a vaulted cellar, with five more added on the ground floor some years later to avoid too much running up and down staircases when conducting multiple experiments.

The mystery element is tungsten.

Shrouded in Secrecy

As for the experiments themselves, the quantity of raw materials used and the processes they were subjected to were closely guarded and extremely lucrative secrets.

This brings us to current news: Danish scientists have now shed some light on the chemical substances Brahe kept secret in a recent article in Heritage Science (DOI: 10.1186/s40494-024-01301-6).

Fragments of glass and ceramic ware retrieved from the remains of Brahe’s now-demolished laboratory and analyzed using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma with mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), a technique capable of highly sensitive elemental and isotopic analyses.

Four of the elements, copper, antimony, gold and mercury, are in accordance with reconstructed recipes of Paracelsian medicines for which Brahe was famous.

Enriched levels of these elements, plus tin and zinc, have been found on both the inside and outside of the shards. The mystery element is tungsten.

"Tungsten had not even been described at that time, so what should we infer from its presence on a shard from Tycho Brahe's alchemy workshop?" asked Kaare Lund Rasmussen, professor emeritus and expert in archaeometry, from the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark.

One theory is that Brahe unwittingly isolated the element while processing its mineral sources for use in his recipes — 180 years before Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele is credited with describing and producing it.

Another, from Lund Rasmussen and admittedly unsupported by any evidence, is that Brahe might have heard about the work of German mineralogist Georgius Agricola in the first half of the 1500s.

Agricola described something strange in tin ore from Saxony, which caused problems when he tried to smelt the metal. He called this strange substance "Wolfram," German for Wolf's froth. Wolfram was later renamed tungsten in English, but the W stuck.

Perhaps Brahe was on its trail.

More Clues from Brahe Himself

However, Lund Rasmussen has cleared a couple of Brahe-related metallic mysteries. His analysis of the alchemist’s beard and bones following a 2010 exhumation found mercury levels weren’t abnormally high — settling the rumors that Brahe had been poisoned, possibly by jealous fellow astronomer Johannes Kepler.

At the same time, greenish stains around the nasal areas of Brahe's corpse contained traces of copper and zinc, indicating that his prosthetic nose was made of brass and not silver or gold, as many believed.

As usual with Brahe, details are sketchy on how he lost his nose, but it seems likely it was severed in a drunken sword fight with a cousin.

About the Author

Seán Ottewell | Editor-at-Large

Seán Crevan Ottewell is Chemical Processing's Editor-at-Large. Seán earned his bachelor's of science degree in biochemistry at the University of Warwick and his master's in radiation biochemistry at the University of London. He served as Science Officer with the UK Department of Environment’s Chernobyl Monitoring Unit’s Food Science Radiation Unit, London. His editorial background includes assistant editor, news editor and then editor of The Chemical Engineer, the Institution of Chemical Engineers’ twice monthly technical journal. Prior to joining Chemical Processing in 2012 he was editor of European Chemical Engineer, European Process Engineer, International Power Engineer, and European Laboratory Scientist, with Setform Limited, London.

He is based in East Mayo, Republic of Ireland, where he and his wife Suzi (a maths, biology and chemistry teacher) host guests from all over the world at their holiday cottage in East Mayo.