The most informative pages in the medical notebook of Tycho Brahe had not been written yet they have started up like misty chemical impressions on broken glass. In a Renaissance culture where medicines were regarded as trade secrets, even a few fragments of the shattered house and observatory of Brahe provide us with an unusually personal insight into what Brahe heated, washed and condensed and kept underground. It is not surprising that the renowned sky-watcher maintained a laboratory, nor that the residue indicates that he must have been working with a metal chemistry would not acknowledge for almost two centuries, but it is surprising that it was not lost on him.
The Uraniborg complex of the island of Ven was an observatory, dwelling and workshop in the basement, where Brahe lived and worked until his death in 1601, after which it was dismantled. In 1988-1990 excavations, some fragments of glass and ceramics that archaeologists found in the area of the old garden were thought to belong to the alchemical rooms. Out of that bigger set, scientists ended up with a set of five pieces to experiment with: four glass pieces and one shred of ceramics.
Those fragments were samples of a reconstruction of an early-modern practice in a modern way. The mass spectrometry technique was used to examine 31 trace elements as cross-sections of the samples and identifies tiny masses as a charged particle. One fragment was used as a sort of control-it did not show any special chemical enrichment in either direction-and the rest were loaded with higher concentrations which showed that they had been repeatedly exposed to certain substances. Some of the enriched elements included nickel, copper, zinc, tin, antimony, gold, mercury, lead, and one outlier that disrupted the neat narrative of supposedly expected alchemy: tungsten. Tungsten is a very secretive thing, Kaare Lund Rasmussen said. The presence of tungsten had not yet been characterised, so what shall we assume on its appearance on one of the shards of the alchemy laboratory of Tycho Brahe?
To the reader of Wellbeing Whisper, the fascination lies not so much in metallurgy, as much in the meaning of the term “medicine” in that period.
Brahe was a part of a Paracelsian school that regarded the laboratory as an alchemy place to produce health-remedies against the plague, skin diseases, fevers, and stomach problems, and not a smelting-room. His most well-known cure to the plague might include as many ingredients as possible containing up to 60 items of baroque mixture, which included opium and snake flesh, oils, herbs, and metallic elements. The list of elements on the shards corresponds to that worldview: there are elements such as gold and mercury, which are neither curiosities nor discoveries, but intentional contents believed to bear some special properties, and these special contents are found in preparation only among higher-end clients who can afford the preparation. The traces that have been newly discovered are not conclusive of what was present in any drug that was actually administered but the levels do suggest that some materials were used repeatedly to an extent that a trace remains.
The tungsten dilemma is a question that is too hard to answer as the pieces cannot be used to get intent but only contact. This means that Tungsten is present in certain minerals by nature, so the fact that it is present may be due to an ore or compound being brought to the laboratory to accomplish a different task, then heated and processed until the metal started showing up on the surfaces of the vessel. There is another historical complication to the image: a German mineralogist, Georgius Agricola, wrote of an unpleasant smelting byproduct that he referred to as Wolfram in the mid-16th century, and tungsten later appeared in German chemistry by the same name. Perhaps Tycho Brahe had heard this, and and so had known of the existence of tungsten, said Rasmussen, but this is not what we know or what we can say on the basis of the analyses that I have carried out. It is just a hypothetical suggestion of why tungsten can be found in the samples.
What the fragments do make clear is the smoothness with which the laboratory that Brahe had constructed next to his astronomy existed. It might appear odd that Tycho Brahe was both an astronomer and an alchemist, yet, according to Poul Grinder-Hansen, it is quite logical when one comprehends his world-view. He had a belief that there were self-evident links between the celestial bodies, earthly materials and the body parts. Metals and planets were arranged in that schema, which identified gold with the Sun and the heart; silver with the Moon and the brain; each other metal correlates with each other in a chain of correspondences, making cosmic medicine seem coherent.
Hundreds of years after, the most outspoken informant of those secrets is not a manuscript recipe, but a coat of elements testimony that some health practice as secret as any proprietary compound was still practised by the Renaissance, and left a residue behind it where fire came into contact with glass.
