Great Thinkers Who Met Tragicomically Gruesome Ends

Tycho Brahe was a sixteenth-century Danish, astronomer, astrologer and alchemist, most famous as the mentor of Johannes Kepler. In 1566 after a rousing night of drinking, Tycho lost a good part of his nose in a duel. Tycho was also the patron of whom he believed to be a clairvoyant dwarf and kept a tame moose, which died after consuming an enormous quantity of beer and falling down the stairs.

	Tycho Brahe was a sixteenth-century Danish, astronomer, astrologer and alchemist, most famous as the mentor of Johannes Kepler. In 1566 after a rousing night of drinking, Tycho lost a good part of his nose in a duel. Tycho was also the patron of whom he believed to be a clairvoyant dwarf and kept a tame moose, which died after consuming an enormous quantity of beer and falling down the stairs. Popular wisdom holds that Tycho Brahe died from an infection caused by a severely strained bladder, gained while trying to avoid leaving the table in the middle of a formal banquet. Other accounts hold that Kepler murdered Tycho with a mercury draught.

In 1626, the philosopher and essayist Sir Francis Bacon was trying to prove that freezing preserves food. His experiments included stuffing a chicken with snow. Not long after said experiment, he died of hypothermia.

In 1687, composers commonly conducted their music by banging a staff on the floor of the podium. In a fit of musical exuberance, composer Jean-Baptiste Lully accidentally pierced his foot and later died of gangrene.

Hypatia of Alexandria is considered the first important woman in mathematics. After being accused of heresy, she was killed by a mob wielding seashells, which used said shells to peel the flesh from her body. Her remains were then burned. Some say this marked the official end of the Hellenistic era.

The Greek philosopher Chrysippus is known as the second founder of Stoicism. His death in 207 BC is widely believed to have been the result of intense laughter sustained after feeding his donkey a significant quantity of wine and then watching it try to eat a fig.

Girgori Rasputin was adviser to Nicholas II of Russia, offering advice, mystic predictions and faith healing. After being stabbed in a failed assassination attempt, Rasputin’s intestines were sewn into his body. The next assassination attempt was more serious. First, Rasputin was given a massive dose of cyanide (he was largely unaffected); next, he was shot (again, largely unaffected, he managed to strangle to death his shooter); additional assassins arrived, shooting Rasputin three more times, clubbing him, wrapping him in a sheet and throwing him through a hole in an ice-covered river. The cause of death was hypothermia.