Tycho Brahe was quite a character. From Brahe’s bladder & Mozart’s murder:
Tycho Brahe died in 1601 at 54. He had come to Prague from his native Denmark to serve as Imperial Mathematician under Rudolph II. Legend holds that during a banquet held by Rudolph or another worthy, Brahe had to pee so bad his bladder burst. The etiquette of the day required that he not rise before his host. Probably he did postpone urinating despite extreme discomfort. His bladder did not, however, pop on the spot as some Prague guidebooks suggest.Arriving home he was unable to urinate (or sleep) for five days. Thereafter he fell into anguished delirium for another six days before he died. He seems to have been oddly certain of his coming death. Repeatedly he said that he wanted not to have lived in vain.
Modern forensics has established — by testing remnants of his beard exhumed from his cathedral tomb — that he probably died of mercury poisoning. Foul play cannot be ruled out but the favored theory is that he took medicine of high mercury content — common in those days — to treat a longstanding urinary problem.
Indeed, so exact were the tests that it was determined from the relative position of the mercury within a single hair’s length that Brahe ingested a significant quantity of the stuff about 20 hours before his death.
Brahe was an intriguing character: he had a silver prosthetic nose, for one thing, having lost the original in a duel. He is said to have reveled fiercely all his life and he kept a dwarf as a jester and an elk as a pet. A burst bladder fits nicely into this general description and seems a fitting end.
However Brahe would surely prefer — witness his dying wish — to be remembered for his scientific achievements. In addition to creating the most sophisticated astronomical instruments to date, and tutoring the next generation of astronomers including Johannes Kepler, Brahe introduced a meticulousness of observation without which further advances in astronomy would have been impossible.