René Descartes: The Suspected Poisoning and the Skull Split from History

On 11 February 1650, René Descartes died in Stockholm after several months working for Queen Christina of Sweden. He was only 53. The royal household and its doctors announced pneumonia. But medical letters written close to the event describe a different course. In 2019, philosopher Theodor Ebert reread letters by Descartes’s servant Henri Schluter, physician Johann van Wullen, ambassador Pierre Chanut, and biographer Adrien Baillet. He concluded that Descartes had a high probability of being poisoned with arsenic on 2 and 8 February, with the second exposure possibly fatal.

After his death, the head of the founder of coordinate geometry did not remain with the body. When the Stockholm grave was opened in 1667 to move the remains to France, the skull was gone. The Musée de l’Homme records that the officer assigned to guard the body stole it. Two centuries later, a skull engraved with the names of past owners was sold to chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius and brought to France in 1821. At the same time, another skull fragment in Lund, Sweden, carried the inscription “Cartesius’s skull, 1691, number 6.”