AP—Walter C. McCrone, a chemical analyst who used his microscope to conclude that the Shroud of Turin never enveloped the body of Jesus and that a famous ancient map belonging to Yale University is probably a fake, died on July 10 in Chicago, long his hometown. He was 86. Dr. McCrone, a pioneer in the art of chemical microscopy, also produced evidence contradicting the theory that Napoleon was poisoned on St. Helena by agents of the re-established French monarchy: the arsenic levels he found in the emperor’s hair were simply too low.
On the other hand, when he put samples of Beethoven’s hair under a microscope, he discovered that the composer had suffered from lead poisoning, possibly contracted at health spas. That exposure might explain the alternating fits of depression and towering rages that Beethoven suffered in later life, and perhaps his deafness. In 1978, Dr. McCrone declared that his examination of the Shroud of Turin, a 14-foot strip of linen bearing the shadowy imprint of a dead man, was not the cloth in which Jesus was buried after the Crucifixion, contrary to what pious pilgrims had believed for centuries, but instead a “fantastic work of art” from the Middle Ages. The image, he found, had been painted onto the cloth in medieval times with red ocher and vermilion pigments. Dr. McCrone speculated that this had probably been done by priests hoping to create a “relic” for their church that would attract pilgrims and their donations.
—Someone all Dopers can look up to. First Dr. Gould, now this . . .