Alexander Bogdanov

In 1924, Bogdanov started experimenting on himself. The Russian physician would give himself blood transfusions and he claimed that it had stopped his baldness and improved his eyesight. Four years later, another transfusion of blood infected with tuberculosis and malaria caused his death.

Carl Scheele

Famed pharmaceutical chemist, Scheele discovered many different types of chemical elements. He also discovered a process that was very similar to pasteurisation. Unfortunately for Scheele, he had a bad habit of tasting everything he discovered. He died of symptoms very similar to mercury poisoning.

Sir David Brewster

Brewster was the Scottish inventor of the kaleidoscope. His main interests were, of course, optics and light polarisation. In 1831, a chemical experiment he was working on went terribly wrong and it almost blinded him. Brewster had eye difficulties for the rest of his life.

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Elizabeth Ascheim

Ascheim was the wife of Dr Woolf, they both had a major fascination with the x-ray machine (invented by Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen). The couple spent years experimenting with the machine which was attributed to the widespread and violent cancers they died from.

Galileo Galilei

Galileo is famed for his work on refinement of the telescope. He was overly fascinated with the sun and spent a lot of his time staring at it. Not surprisingly, this led to extreme damage to his retinas which left him blind for the last 4 years of his life.

Sir Humphrey Davy

On the bright-side (for the world at least) Davy’s work on various gases led to the discovery of the anaesthetic properties of nitrous oxide. Unfortunately for him personal, the inhaling of the gases he worked with led him to become an invalid for the last 20 years of his life.

Jean-Francois de Rozier

De Rozier was a famed physics and chemistry professor. He assisted in the first untethered balloon flight, which included a sheep, a chicken and a duck. He went on to attempt the first crossing of the English Channel by balloon. It was just an attempt because the balloon deflated and he fell to his death.

Marie Curie

It was in 1898 that Curie and her husband Pierre discovered radium and polonium. She was a double Nobel Prize winner for her work spent performing radiation research and studying radiation therapy. It caught up with her though as the constant exposure led to her contracting leukaemia.

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Michael Faraday

Two bits of bad luck for Faraday. It was bad enough for him that he suffered from the effects of chronic chemical poisoning, but he also suffered sever damage to his eyes after a nitrogen trichloride explosion. It didn’t dampen his spirits though.

Robert Bunsen

Bunsen will, of course, always be noted for lending his name to the Bunsen burner, the standard way to torch something in a classroom. Bunsen almost died twice of arsenic poisoning. After an explosion of cacodyl cyanide one day in his lab as he worked, he lost the sight in his right eye permanently.