TY - JOUR
AU1 - Shmuely,, Shira
AB - Abstract Curare, a paralysing poison derived from South American plants, fascinated European explorers with its deadly powers. Generations of travellers were perplexed by how animals affected by curare showed no signs of suffering. British experimenters relabelled curare as an anaesthetic and used it to restrain animals during experiments. But during the 19th century, doubts started to appear: can a paralysed animal feel pain but be unable to express it? A scientific dispute emerged as not all British physiologists accepted Claude Bernard’s claim that curare affected only the motor nerves. The scientific controversy over curare reached the British parliament, and the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) stated that curare would not be considered an anaesthetic. Nevertheless, antivivisection advocates continued to contest its use for decades. The article reveals new aspects of colonial import of bioactive plants in a case that reshaped the production of medical knowledge and presented epistemological and moral challenges. animals, bioprospecting, law, physiology, vivisection On 22 May 1876, Earl of Carnarvon stood before his fellow members at the House of Lords. He had prepared a long speech for that day, on which the second reading of a bill to regulate experimentation on living animals was scheduled. The proposed act, he assured his listeners, would restrict the use of the ‘so-called anaesthetic known as urari or curari’. Curare’s presence in British laboratories was unwelcome ‘for independently of the atrocious cruelty, practices such as these must lead to the demoralisation of those who assisted in them’.1 This article traces the journey of arrow poison curare from South America to the British Parliament and examines the moral, epistemological and legal questions evoked by the medicinal importation. The explorers who encountered the use of curare in the Amazonian jungles during the 18th and 19th centuries were fascinated by its ability to produce a quick and silent death. The local hunters’ poison killed animals promptly, and their bodies dropped with an awful silence. Except for a small wound, no traces of violence could be found; the animal made no groans and did not vomit or twist its body in the familiar struggles of death. Curare was derived from the roots of a variety of woody vines. Today, curare is understood to operate as a muscle relaxant through neuromuscular blocking: a chemical compound, d-Tubocurarine, disconnects the motor nerves from the muscles. The result is a temporary paralysis while the sensory neurons remain unaffected. Responding to scholarship that examines the impact colonial science had on colonised populations and territories, historians of science have traced the varied influences the encounter with new societies and environments had on the colonisers’ scientific ideas, instruments and practices.2 As Londa Schiebinger noted, ‘indigenous European sciences changed as much as did indigenous non-European sciences over the course of the global encounters sparked by European voyaging and conquest’.3 Although never a major commodity in colonial trade, curare had a substantial influence on Western medical science. Curare facilitated French physiologist Claude Bernard’s formation of a nerve system theory. In addition, curare had far-reaching practical potential. Due to its relaxing effects on the muscles, curare had become a popular device to make animals motionless during experimentation. Adding tubocurarine allowed surgeons to minimise the quantities of anaesthetics needed to make a body easy to handle and, thus, reduced the risks involved in deep anaesthesia for human and non-human bodies.4 Physicians also found curare to be a useful tool for treating the symptoms of tetanus and rabies.5 The action of using curare even acquired a verb: the Dictionary of Toxicology defines ‘curarisation’ as ‘the administration of curare to induce the relaxation of skeletal muscle, usually prior to surgery’.6 Thus, during the 19th and 20th centuries, curare was transformed from a horrifying poison into a popular surgical tool, described by some as a ‘major achievement of modern anaesthesia’ after the introduction of ether.7 Curare was not the only hunting technology to turn into a Western remedy. The case of Strophanthus plants, a source for African poison arrows, demonstrates a similar journey. British researchers transformed the substance extracted from Malawi Strophanthus Kombe into a cardiac drug during the second half of the 19th century. Markku Hokkanen’s study of Strophanthus examines ‘how useful substances were named, appropriated and transferred from Africa to the West, how they were transformed into products, and what roles various agents played in these processes’.8Strophanthus-based poisoned arrows were also at the nexus of colonialism and modern pharmacology in early 20th-century West Africa. Abena Osseo-Asare analysed the interconnections between the outlawing of poisoned arrows in the Gold Coast and the simultaneous colonial investment in exporting Strophanthus and remaking it into the drug strophanthin.9 The history of curare introduces an additional dimension to this historiography. The encounter with New World botanical knowledge not only changed Western science, but it also sparked epistemological and moral debates. A motionless animal body was a welcome device in the growing physiological research, but its sight was troubling for a society that was defining its humane obligations towards non-human animals. Transplanted and re-contextualised in British 19th-century cultural and social surroundings, curare raised doubts about the ability to interpret human and animal unarticulated experiences. The uncertainties regarding the effects of the drug led to a confrontation between legislators and scientists and dictated adjustments in the law overseeing the treatment of animals in experiments that remain in force to the present day. In following curare, I draw upon principal elements in Actor–Network Theory (ANT) in Science and Technology Studies. ANT integrates human and non-human actors in analyses of the construction of scientific knowledge and allocates, at least theoretically, the same weight to the various actors operating in the network.10 I implement ANT narrowly, since unlike ideal-type ANT studies, I do not attribute interests to the curare poison, nor do I explore its ways of assembling networks with other actors.11 I do, however, position curare as the leading figure of this historical narrative, which crosses broad chronological and geographical spans. This is done at the expense of a detailed account of the actions and motivations of curare’s human users. However, following the material rather than the human actors takes us to places that a conservative narrative in the history of medicine could have missed. One example in this case is the poison’s appearance in the documents of the British Home Office. Indeed, as Arjun Appadurai explained in a different context of anthropological research, ‘even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological (emphasis in original) point of view it is the thing-in-motion that illuminates their human and social context’.12 Another gain from implementing an ANT-informed methodology is the elucidation of the ways humans and non-human actors affect each other in establishing scientific theories and practices. As Sergio Sismondo clarifies, for technological artifacts to be successful, ‘they must be made to fit their environment or their environments must be made to fit them’.13 The changes in the receiving environment include, as in the case of curare, social adjustments.14 This article not only examines the transformations curare underwent through its relocation to British laboratories, rather it emphasises how curare changed its new environment. Its use provoked new ethical questions and necessitated bureaucratic supervision of experiments using neuromuscular blocking agents in animal research. The transformation of curare into a medical device was part of the wider phenomenon of colonial bioprospecting. Cori Hayden defined ‘bioprospecting’ as ‘corporate drug developments based on medicinal plants, traditional knowledge, and microbes culled from the “biodiversity-rich” regions of the globe’.15 Although the term bioprospecting was coined to describe a disputed contemporary practice, scholars such as Osseo-Asare employed the concept retrospectively to describe ‘forms of exploration for new medicines and crops similarly dependent on remote biological resources, scientific research, local knowledge and market-driven outcomes’ as part of colonial expansion and exploitation.16 Naturalists surveying colonial resources expanded the search for medicinal plants during the 18th century.17 The quest for new plants was motivated by monetary gains, the aspiration to make European countries ‘pharmaceutically self-sufficient’ and the need to guard European troops from tropical maladies.18 Underlying these needs was the creation and sustenance of an imperial system. Mary Louise Pratt identified naturalists’ explorations as creating a ‘planetary consciousness’, ‘an orientation towards interior exploration and the construction of a global-scale meaning through the descriptive apparatuses of natural history’.19 Depiction was inseparable from dominion. ‘The sciences’, wrote Richard Drayton in his study on botany, ‘with their promise of insight into, and control over, nature, lent potent ideological help’ to imperial expansion.20 While some argue that the 16th-century British adventurer Walter Raleigh was the first to bring samples of the deadly poison to Europe, more recent historians claim that it was the French explorer Charles Marie de la Condamine who was sent in 1735 by the French Academy of Sciences to explore present-day Ecuador.21 The reason for the confusion is partly semantic. Europeans called various deadly poisons ‘curare’ and sometimes, also woorari, wooraly, urari, urali (what is arguably the earliest English publication used the spelling ourari). Around 20 variants could be counted by 1911.22 However, scholars agree that there was a dominant poison, with a traceable geographical distribution, causing similar symptoms.23 For the following three centuries, military personnel, missionaries and naturalists reported back to Berlin, London, Madrid and Paris about the mysterious dark paste with which hunters in South America smeared their darts and arrows.24 The 18th– and 19th-century European accounts of the way Native Americans prepared curare varied in details, but they agreed on a core process. A group of knowledgeable men went to the woods to collect bark and roots (it is estimated that the bark of more than 12 species entered into the preparation of curare).25 Back in the village, the plants were boiled together. The yellow blend was filtered, and the liquid was boiled again. In order to thicken the blend so that it would stick to arrows, an infusion of vegetable sap was added. The colour of the boiling mixture then turned coffee dark, and its texture was transformed into what resembled tar or thick syrup. During the process of preparation, the person in charge of it fasted. It took several days before the paste was ready for use, but it remained effective for months and possibly even years.26 Curare was used by various groups living in the area stretching from the Amazon and Orinoco basins to the north east of Bolivia and the central Brazilian plateau. Following the Spanish conquest and consequent changes in the interactions among ethnic groups, indigenous people inhabiting remote forest areas also adopted this hunting technique.27 This article will focus on the encounter of Europeans with curare, long after it was concocted by South American hunters. Edward Bancroft, a physiologist and spy for both Britain and the American colonies, observed curare in action during his travel to the Dutch territories of Guiana in the 1760s.28 Astonished by the local hunters, whose arrow assured ‘inevitable death to the animal from which it draws blood’,29 Bancroft concluded that no European could imitate this success. A few Accawau (Acawai) physicians provided Bancroft with oral instructions about the preparation of curare, but apparently none showed him the procedure in practice.30 Bancroft also learned that the poison was particularly fitting for killing monkeys: while monkeys hit with a regular arrow ran to the peak of the trees and sometimes stayed there to die, curare made their limbs useless so that they fell to the ground and rolled to the feet of the hunter.31 How could such a small wound create these fatal results? Bancroft could trace no changes in the blood of dead animals ‘and yet the animals expired as it were by an insensible extinction of the vital flame’.32 Eventually, he concluded that only immediate injury to the ‘sensible nervous system’ or to the ‘force of the vital functions’ could explain such a speedy death.33 Part of his fascination with the poison was due to what he believed was the non-existence of pain. He observed that an animal hurt by the poison does not show any signs of pain or uneasiness but ‘slight convulsions seen near the instant of expiration’.34 During his stay in Surinam, Bancroft tested an existing theory according to which the substance was fatal because it coagulated the blood. He boiled curare together with a sample of human blood; however, the experiment was interrupted when a drop of the liquid hurt one of his eyes, and he needed several days to recover.35 Bancroft brought a substantial amount of curare back to Britain and invited the readers of his travel essays to get samples from his publisher: ‘As the author has brought a considerable quantity of this Poison to England, any Gentleman, whose genius may incline him to prosecute these experiments, and whose character will warrant us to confide in his hands a preparation, capable of perpetrating the most secret and fatal villainy, may be supplied with a sufficient quantity of the Woorara’.36 And they were. Physiologist and surgeon Benjamin Brodie obtained one of Bancroft’s samples for a series of experiments he conducted in years 1811–12.37 Brodie applied a small quantity of curare to a wound of a guinea pig. Ten minutes later, the animal was unable to walk and ‘gradually became insensible’. It seemed dead, but its heart kept beating for several minutes.38 He repeated the procedure in a following experiment and observed the same symptoms, but at the 13th minute, he introduced the use of artificial respiration.39 With the help of a small pair of bellows, he prolonged the lives of paralysed animals, thus opening a new era of experimentation: with the new technique and the right quantities of curare, the animal stayed alive yet conveniently lifeless for any invasive procedure.40 But for a 19th-century gentleman, there was another benefit to the use of curare. A painless death provided the experimenter with an ethical advantage. Charles Waterton, an eccentric British ornithologist, taxidermist and a ‘true “field naturalist”’41 experimented with the poison in his 1812 travel to Dutch Guiana and upon his return to England. Similarly to Bancroft and Brodie, Waterton was confident that an animal injected with curare did not suffer any pain. However, he reframed this observation in relation to cruelty to animals. Waterton felt obliged to justify his experiments with curare. He assured his readers that he did not use more animals than needed and explained the peculiar anaesthetic qualities of curare: Though the kind-hearted will be sorry to read of an unoffending animal doomed to death in order to satisfy a doubt, still it will be a relief to know that the victim was not tortured. The wourali poison destroys life's action so gently that the victim appears to be in no pain whatever; and probably, were the truth known, it feels none, saving the momentary smart at the time the arrow enters.42 Feeling Without Moving In the mid-19th century, doubts arose at what first seemed liked a perfect experimental body. French physiologist Claude Bernard was introduced to curare in 1844.43 Bernard did not know much about the poison at the time, and the accounts by Alexander von Humboldt and other explorers provided him with information about curare’s origins and action but failed to provide ‘an idea about the mechanisms of death by curare’.44 Bernard developed his theory on the effect of curare in a series of experiments done in 1856 in which he examined the effect of curare on the circulation, muscles and nerve systems. He noted that at first sight, the curarised animal looks insentient, but ‘the opposite is what takes place, and curare is an anaesthetic agent only in appearance, for the animal feels, but cannot show it’.45 The challenge posed by curare manifested a fundamental concern: ‘Who knows’ wondered Bernard, ‘whether in certain cases of chloroform anesthesia, the subject does not actually feel, but loses the recollection of the pain when he awakens?’46 Bernard explained that a special experimental difficulty arose by animals, resting on the fact that, ‘in the animals, one can judge sensitivity only by motor manifestations. Man alone, on recovering from poisoning by curare, would be able to say, supposing that he had retained the memory, whether or not he had suffered’.47 A set of experiments done in the mid-1850s convinced Bernard that curare does not render the animal insentient. Bernard focused on the reflex action under the influence of curare. His method was to divide the animal body into curare-affected and unaffected parts and to examine the reaction in unaffected parts to a stimulation of affected parts: in an experiment on a frog, he isolated one limb, so that the substance permeated only some parts of the body. Then he pricked the skin in the poisoned part. While no response was documented in the affected part, the isolated limb that did not contain curare moved.48 A later report in the British Medical Journal on this ‘most ingenious method of experiment’ explained: ‘It was then clear that the sensory nerves and spinal cord retained their functions, and that the want of movement in the poisoned parts of the body was due only to the paralysis of the motor nerves, which prevented the spinal cord from setting the muscles in this parts into action’.49 Bernard, in other words, inferred that the sensory nerves were not affected by curare.50 Meanwhile, vivisectors had found out that when administrated in the right quantities, curare made invasive procedures much easier.51 During the 19th century, curare became a common experimental tool in physiological practice. In this process, as Mary Pratt writes, ‘natural history extracted specimens not only from their organic or ecological relations with each other, but also from their places in other peoples’ economies, histories, social and symbolic systems’.52 Bernard advocated the use of curare in experiments, stating in an 1864 essay that the ‘poison becomes an instrument which dissociates and analyses the most delicate phenomena of the living machine’.53 The instrumental approach to curare was gradually incorporated into British physiological research. As physician Thomas Lauder Brunton had explained, ‘when we wish to render the animal absolutely motionless, or to observe what effect any drug will produce after the motor nerves have been paralysed, we give curare’.54 In a sensational 1873 vivisection manual, Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory, the authors recommend using curare to keep animals still as an alternative to tying them down. Specifically, they explained that curare was useful for studying the circulation of the blood in frogs, rabbits and dogs.55 Physiologists obtained small quantities of curare mixtures from travellers and fellow researchers: Brodie, for example, got his from Bancroft and Bernard from chemist Théophile-Jules Pelouze.56 In addition, there are indications for some trade in the pharmaceutical market. Brunton shared with his readers in 1871 that ‘curare may be obtained from Messrs. Hopkin and Williams, New Cavendish Street, London; or from Bruckner and Lampe, Leipzig’.57 The poison, which was initially used as a killing device by hunters in the Amazon area, became a laboratory tool for keeping animals alive yet conveniently lifeless. The Curare Debate at the Royal Commission on Vivisection Bernard’s interpretation of curare’s action on the nerves made waves on the other side of the channel. Most importantly, for animal welfare advocates, Bernard’s experiments showed that animals under the influence of curare were deprived of the ability to show signs of pain. At that period, Britons’ concerns with the morality of animal experimentation were becoming acute.58 Calls for the state to ban or control the practice of vivisection were supplemented with horrific descriptions of animals under curare.59 In response to the public outcry, Home Secretary Richard Cross announced on 24 May 1875 the Royal Commission on the Practice of Subjecting Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes.60 Aiming to ‘consider whether any and what measures ought to be adopted in respect to that practice’, the Commission interviewed 53 witnesses, including ‘many eminent physicians and surgeons and physiologists of great reputation’.61 Among others, the Commission inquired into the question of curare. Some physiologists testified that curare worked as an anaesthetic and spared the animal the sensation of pain. For example, Lauder Brunton, then a lecturer in materia medica and pharmacology in Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital and a fellow of the Royal Society, opined that Bernard was mistaken. Brunton claimed that he succeeded in demonstrating ‘that wourali certainly paralyses the sensory nerves as well as the motor’.62 Prominent medical figures joined this interpretation. Histologist and bacteriologist Edward Emanuel Klein, a contributor to the vivisection manual mentioned earlier, contended that curare diminished suffering in frogs, referring the Commission to experiments made by Moritz Schiff.63 For Klein, pain and movement were interconnected: ‘We take it generally that when we pinch the frog and it does not move it does not feel’.64 Francis Sibson, a physician at St. Mary’s Hospital, member of the Senate of the University of London and Fellow of the Royal Society, presented a genuine idea about pain under curare. He claimed that even if curare did not render the body insentient, it still lessened the experience of pain, since ‘the animal would be perfectly at rest; there would be no struggling; the incisions would be made with great ease’. Ascribing to curare somewhat meditative powers Sibson maintained, ‘the animal mind would be withdrawn from what I would call the domain of attention and where there is no attention there is no sensation, no sensitiveness, no pain’.65 Others expressed ambivalent opinion yet inclined were to believe curare had a certain effect on the nervous system.66 Renowned physiologist William Sharpey claimed that there was not enough data to determine how curare operates. But the Commission Chairman Viscount Cardwell pushed Sharpey on that point, raising the question of public interest. The Chairman asked, ‘If the public have any rights at all in this matter to have their feeling respected, those rights are not regarded when the experiments performed under worari poison are held out as experiments performed under anaesthetic’? Sharpey had to admit he thought ‘that is not a sufficient answer to the public’.67 Oxford professor George Rolleston believed that curare in large doses has anaesthetic qualities. He commented, however, that ‘the whole question of anaesthetising animals has an element of uncertainty about it’.68 William Rutherford also tended to believe that there was an anaesthetic element in curare. He was familiar with Bernard’s theory but contended that subsequent research, including his own, show that curare acts also on the brain and spinal cord and was ‘to some extent an anaesthetic’.69 Some of the difficulty in defining curare’s effects was, according to Alfred Swaine Taylor, due to the uniformity in its origins. Taylor, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal Society, believed that curare operated as a sedative. When confronted by the Commission with Bernard’s theory on the action of curare, he replied that ‘the differences are to be explained by the fact that what is sold as curare, the extract, is liable to variation’.70 Flipping the roles between animals and vivisectors, commissioner William Edward Forster suggested that curare actually alleviated the experimenter's distress by preventing the animal from crying.71 The claim that curare had anaesthetic qualities was highly contested, since some witnesses argued—as did Claude Bernard—that curare had no affect on the sensory nerves. The curarised animal feels pain, they argued, but cannot express it. George Hoggan, self-described as the first to bring up the question of curare’s abuse in England, expressed a full confidence in Bernard’s theory.72 Similarly, Arthur de Noe Walker, a private practitioner in London, was convicted that curare was not an anaesthetic and that ‘its use for that purpose should be forbidden’.73 Physiologist and doctor of medicine Arthur Gamgee testified that he ‘commenced some very careful experiments’ with the poison on ‘hopelessly epileptic’ children who were hospitalised at the Children’s Hospital at Manchester.74 Gamgee wished to examine the hypothesis that curare can be useful in treating ‘nervous affections’. Having experimented with curare on animals in the past, he was aware of its deadly potential, and thus, he began his experiments with a very small dosage of curare, which he increased gradually. In ‘one little girl’, he noted ‘a slight paralysis of the muscles of expression’. The girl complained that she ‘could not raise her arms, and on rising to walk she fell’. Watching the girl, Gamgee was convinced that sensibility was not impaired by curare.75 The Royal Commission acknowledged in its report that the poison was ‘very convenient to an operator, since it paralyses the motor nerves, and keeps the animal quiet’. But its usefulness for physiological research was overshadowed by the findings of Bernard, ‘perhaps the highest authority on such a subject’.76 As the Commission explained, ‘An animal may be suffering exquisite torture and yet (so far as we yet know) the worari poison may, by its effect upon the motor nerves, prevent demonstration of any feeling’.77 The epistemic doubt existed also regarding the converse event, when ‘an animal may make every demonstration of suffering while the real sensation is destroyed’. These uncertainties in identifying pain were not restricted to animals. Even with human patients under chloroform, or those suffering from an injury to the spine, ‘it sometimes happens that all outward manifestation of pain is exhibited, when the patient afterwards disclaims having experienced any sensation of it’.78 It should be noted, however, that the Commission was not anonymous in its findings. From the sessions’ proceedings, it is clear that Thomas Henry Huxley, who sat on the Commission, advocated a different view. Huxley criticised Bernard, arguing the latter had shown at most that curare disturbed the reflex action. Huxley contended that Bernard had ‘jumped to the conclusion’ that curare did not affect sentience, in a publication that was ‘perhaps more worth to the pen of Victor Hugo than of that of a staid physiologist’.79 Nevertheless, the Commission recommended that until the dispute had been settled, curare would not be considered an anaesthetic by law. Curare Reaches the British Parliament The Commission’s recommendation was integrated into a new bill, presented by Earl of Carnarvon in May 1876. The bill required any person who planned to perform a painful experiment on living animals to hold a licence. It also obliged the use of anaesthetics, unless under a special permit (certificate). Clause four of the bill read, ‘The Substance Known as urari or curare shall not for the purposes of this Act be deemed to be an anaesthetic.’ Meaning, that a painful experiment performed with curare and no other anaesthetic would be a violation of the law, unless under a special certificate that allows for experimentation without anaesthesia.80 The Earl of Carnarvon explained to the House that the substance paralysed animals without rendering them insentient. Probably referring to Bernard, Carnarvon mentioned he ‘read somewhere of a very eminent French Professor’ who administered curare to a dog, while remarking “[y]ou observe that there is in his face no sign whatever of suffering, and yet he is enduring the most diabolical torture”’.81 Lord Henniker expressed his support in the curare clause, stating that, ‘although the discovery was wonderful in itself, it was so terrible in its effects that its use ought not to be sanctioned’.82 The Medical Council opposed the proposed restrictions on the use of curare in physiological practice. Responding to the Royal Commission Report and the subsequent bill, the Council carried a motion contending that, ‘in the present state of knowledge as to the properties of woorari, it is inexpedient for Parliament to declare, as in this Bill, that this drug shall not, for the purpose of the Act, be deemed anaesthetic’.83 The Council suggested the alternative according to which: ‘Neither urari nor any other substance should be deemed to be an anaesthetic for the purpose of the Act until it has been proved to be so’.84 From the physiologists’ point of view, they were fighting against an unwelcome interference in their practice, as much as for their authority in matters of science—a realm to which they believed the question of pain and the use of curare belonged. This view was pronounced by an editorial at the Manchester Guardian, which stated, ‘The Bill itself starts by deciding for us a controverted point in regard to the properties of the substance called urari or wourali, or curari or curare, whose very name appears to be in dispute.’ Interpreting curare was not a matter for lawmakers, ‘This assumed power to determine a scientific controversy by Act of Parliament is nothing by the side of the delegated power which it is proposed to give to certain authorities to determine all manner of controversies at their own discretion.’85 But the Medical Council’s proposal to moderate the curare clause failed to convince the lawmakers. Some even attempted to ban the use of curare altogether. During a June debate, Lord Henniker moved an amendment to change the curare clause to read: ‘The Substance Known as urari or curare shall not be used upon any wounded animal.’ Lord Henniker acknowledged that physiologists were agitated because ‘what science left unsettled—namely, the anesthetic qualities of curare, should not be settled by law’.86 Nevertheless, he contended that the proposed phrasing ‘until proved to be so’ at the end of the Medical Council’s clause should not be accepted. ‘If these words were put in, who was to be the person to decide the question?’87 Lord Henniker asked, formulating the problematic nature of curare and the troubling question that hovered over the bodies of paralysed animals for about a century. The proposal to ban the use of curare, however, was withdrawn. Finally, the Royal Commission’s recommendation was accepted, and the scepticism about curare’s abilities to make animals insentient was written into the law.88 Despite the resistance of the scientific lobby, the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) clarified that ‘the substance known as urari or curare shall not for the purposes of this Act be deemed to be an anaesthetic’.89 Curarised animals continued to be a symbol for vivisection horrors in the following decades. The legal restrictions over the use of curare did not alleviate the concerns of antivivisectionists, and the image of the feeling yet unresponsive animal was still a symbol of animals tortured by science. MP Anthony Mundella initiated in February 1877 the House of Commons’ order of returns of experiments conducted under the Vivisection Act. In light of the persistent critique over the use of curare, he asked that, among other information regarding the law’s implementation, the Home Office should publish the number of experiments in which curare has been employed.90 The Home Office, however, did not reveal the data about the use of curare in its annual returns. Using the word curare in official communications would now almost invariably alert officials at the Home Office. When physiologist W. E. F. Thompson applied the Home Office for a licence and described his plan to conduct an experiment that involved the use of curare, he alarmed the civil servants processing his request.91 Stephen Paget from The Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research sent a letter in support of Thomson’s application. Paget acknowledged that ‘curare is not accounted as anaesthetic under the Act’, but the proposed experiment would be done on ‘frogs after the destruction of their higher nervous centers’.92 Physiologists insisted they used curare only with complementary anaesthetics or other techniques such as pithing. However, antivivisectionists warned about the misleading sight of paralysed animals, claiming that the influence of anaesthesia might pass off while curare-induced paralysis was still in effect. In 1883, barrister and politician Bernard Coleridge published a commentary on the Vivisection Act. In reference to the curare clause, he claimed it was ‘impracticable in the case of a totally paralysed and motionless creature to ascertain when an anaesthetic takes effect. Thus curare makes anaesthetics useless’.93 Frances Power Cobbe, the founder of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, referred to curare as ‘mock anaesthesia’.94 Curare in 20th-Century Animal Experimentation Law In 1906, three decades after the legislation of the Vivisection Act, a second Royal Commission on Vivisection was established ‘to inquire into and report upon the practice of subjecting live animals to experiments, whether by vivisection or otherwise; and also to inquire into the law relating to that practice, and its administration; and to report whether any, and if so what, changes are desirable’.95 The second Royal Commission reexamined the question of curare. Stephen Coleridge, Honorary Secretary to the National Anti-Vivisection Society, asked the commissioners ‘to inquire into the nature of the drug curare and to advise whether in view of its alleged effects upon the motor nerves independently of the sensory nerves and the alleged consequent difficulty for any inspector to recognize the presence of agony in an animal subjected to its influence, the drug should be entirely prohibited’.96 Half a century after Bernard’s publication, a consensus was yet to be reached regarding the impact of curare on the body. The Commission stated that ‘it is generally held to paralyse the motor nerves, thus preventing the expression of sensation’. Nevertheless, ‘As to its anaesthetic properties, there is great conflict of opinion’.97 The Committee voiced the concern that the use of curare in conjunction with other anaesthetics might be misleading: the anaesthetic's effects might be diminished while curare was still in action. Some of the commissioners were convinced that the use of curare should be completely banned.98 However, commissioner Mackenzie Dalzell Chalmers found that the use of curare was ‘very seldom’ and ‘the public has serious misgivings as to experiments performed under curare’.99 Nevertheless, he advised his colleagues to condition the use of curare in a special certificate, and under the terms that the animal would be anaesthetised before the operation and kept anaesthetised until death. Against this backdrop, the Committee decided that an inspector or some other Home Office appointee should be present during experiments in which curare was administered. The representative ‘should satisfy himself that the animal is throughout the whole experiment and until its death in a state of complete anaesthesia’.100 Thus, among the main recommendations made by the second Commission was the ‘further limitations as regards the use of curare’.101 The Home Office adopted only some of the second Commission recommendations. It considered the possibility to outlaw the use of curare but was convinced by leading physiologists and pharmacologists that curare was crucial for some experimental procedures, and its prohibition would damage British scientific progress.102 The Home Office also declined the suggestion to mandate the presence of an inspector in any experiment involving the use of curare. Instead, it required experimenters to apply for a special permit to use curare or curare-like drugs, as well as to inform the inspector in advance about such planned procedures.103 It was left to the discretion of the inspectors to decide whether to attend the experiment.104 The additional limitations over the use of curare were articulated in a new condition that was added to all licences, mandatory to any person who wished to experiment on living animals: No experiments in which curare or other substances having familiar curare-form effect upon the neuro-muscular system is used shall be performed without the special permission of the Secretary of State; and 48 hours notice of the performance of every experiment or series of similar experiments so permitted shall be given to the Inspector of the District. This condition shall not apply to experiments on a decerebrated animal in which the cerebral hemispheres and basal ganglia have been destroyed.105 In 1938, Richard Gill, an American, residing in a ranch in Equador, ventured to collect curare and unravel its botanical sources and preparation techniques. Gill was motivated by his wish to find remedy for muscle spasms resulting from a horse riding accident.106 With guidance from people of the Amazon basin, and in particular the Canelos, Gill first brought samples to the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Nebraska. There, psychiatrist A. E. Bennett and A. R. McIntyre studied the lethal dose of curare as a preliminary step to wide use in human patients. Gill also succeeded in delivering 10 kilograms of curare to pharmaceuticals manufacturer E. R. Squibb & Sons. After centuries in which curare supply had arrived from South American hunters to the hands of Western physiologists primarily through informal, collegial networks of explorers and travellers, E. R. Squibb & Sons marketed a standardised curare as a muscle relaxant under the brand name Intocostrin.107 The new samples enabled the identification of the plant resource of curare as belonging to the families of either Menispermaceae or Loganiaceae. In the early 1940s, chemists isolated d-tubocurarine.108 Curare gradually lost its appeal as a mysterious medicinal plant. During the 20th century, additional muscle relaxants were available in the market and their use became a common practice in surgery. Synthetic compounds increasingly replaced the natural agent tubocurarine. The name ‘curare’ and its complex history disappeared from animal experimentation laws, but the challenges poisonous curare posed to the ethics of animal experimentation endured. The Vivisection Act of 1876, including the curare provision, remained substantially unaltered for more than a century, while the number of experimental animals in Britain surged to millions.109 On 23 May 1963, Home Secretary Henry Brooke initiated a reevaluation of the Act by the Departmental Committee on Experiments on Animals.110 Chaired by Sir Sidney Littlewood, the Committee was assigned ‘to consider the present control over experiments on living animals, and to consider whether, and if so what, changes are desirable in the law or its administration’.111 The Littlewood Report, published in 1965, addressed the question of curare in the chapter ‘Pain in Animals’, under the section ‘Muscle Relaxants’.112 In contrast to the first and second Royal Commissions on Vivisection, the Littlewood Committee expressed little doubt about the impact of curare on sensation: ‘It is evident that the use of muscle-relaxing drug which, in effect, renders an animal physically helpless whilst leaving it fully conscious, opens the way to experiments of extreme cruelty.’113 However, the beneficial aspects of curare and similar muscle relaxants in surgical procedures (on humans as well as on animals) convinced the Committee that the special restrictions over the use of curare should be relieved: [I]t has been represented to us that, in the light of modern knowledge, the special restriction applied to the use of muscle relaxants is unnecessarily burdensome, and that sufficient protection of the animal would be afforded if the use of these drugs were prohibited except in conjunction with anaesthesia of sufficient depth to produce loss of consciousness.114 The Committee, therefore, recommended to amend the Vivisection Act and related Home Office policies so that the requirement for a prior approval and notification of the use of curare would be withdrawn. The Vivisection Act was replaced two decades after the publication of the Littlewood Report by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. Littlewood Committee’s recommendations regarding curare were only partially followed. Article 17 prohibited a person performing an experiment from the use of ‘use any neuromuscular blocking agent unless expressly authorized to do so’ by the licences it held. It also prohibited to ‘use any such agent instead of an anaesthetic’.115 In 2012, the article was amended to a slightly tighter version. Similarly to the 1986 version, the new article prohibited the use of neuromuscular blocking agents without an explicit authorisation. As an addition, it required that neuromuscular blocking agents be used ‘in combination with such level of anaesthesia or analgesia’ as determined in the experimenter’s licence. The revised article also stipulated that the Secretary of State must not grant a licence that authorises the use of neuromuscular blocking agents unless he or she ‘is satisfied, on the basis of a scientific justification’ that the purpose of the research cannot be achieved without the use of such agents.116 The horror at the thought of an animal chemically prevented from expressing its pain remained present in British law well into the 21st century. Conclusion The extraction of curare was an exploitation not only of natural resources but also, and even more profoundly, of Native Americans’ knowledge.117 European explorers had learned about the qualities of this poison, its composition and its way of preparation, by accompanying expeditions of indigenous hunters and the help of local informants. Similarly to other medicinal plants that were retrieved through colonial bioprospecting, curare underwent transformations in its cultural meaning and in its practical use. It was transformed from a hunting technology embedded in South American indigenous rituals to a laboratory tool incorporated into British physiological research. But the peculiarity of curare lays in the changes it generated. Curare introduced new animal bodies to a society that was reshaping its relations with non-human animals. The imported arrow poison confronted observers with a paralysed yet conscious body and blurred the border between life and death, pain and numbness. Curare raised new questions about interpreting animal pain and evoked antivivisectionists’ distrust in the ability of experimenters to minimise the suffering of animals in laboratories. The ambivalence of the scientific community over curare’s influence on the body and its anaesthetic qualities confronted British lawmakers with the question of how should they act in circumstances of scientific uncertainty. The experience with curare led to contemporary restrictions over the use of neuromuscular blocking agents in animal experimentation. Dr Shira Shmuely is a postdoctoral fellow at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University. Shira holds a PhD from the programme in History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is researching law and science, history of pain and animal studies. Footnotes 1 229 Parl. Deb. (3rd ser.) (1876) 1002. 2 Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6; For example, see Judith Carney, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). For a survey of important work on the history of science in British Empire, see Mark Harrison, ‘Science and the British Empire’, Isis, 2005, 96, 56–63. Harrison criticised the broad use of the term ‘colonial science’, claiming it led historians to portray colonial scientific work ‘as more coordinated and unified than it usually was, ignoring dimension of science that were not directed by the state or the East India Company’. Ibid., 56. Londa Schiebinger replied that the term can well describe ‘any science done during the colonial era that involved Europeans working in a colonial context’. Londa Schiebinger, ‘Forum Introduction: The European Colonial Science Complex’, Isis, 2005, 96, 52–55, 52. 3 Schiebinger, ‘Forum Introduction’, 53. 4 Keith Sykes and John Bunker, Anaesthesia and the Practice of Medicine: Historical Perspectives (London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2007), 106. 5 Louis V. Blubaugh and Charles R. Linegar, ‘Curare and Modern Medicine’, Economic Botany, 1948, 2, 73–82, 74. Several publications survey the clinical applications of curare, for example, see Abram Elting Bennett, ‘The Introduction of Curare into Clinical Medicine: Present and Potential Usefulness’, American Scientist, 1946, 34, 426–29. 6 Ernest Hodgson and Michael Roe, eds, ‘Curarization’, in Dictionary of Toxicology (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2014), 98. 7 Thomas K. Burnap and David M. Jr. Little, ‘Preface’, International Anesthesiology Clinics, 1968, 6, vi–vii, vi. 8 Markku Hokkanen, ‘Imperial Networks, Colonial Bioprospecting and Burroughs Wellcome & Co.: The Case of Strophanthus Kombe from Malawi (1859–1915)’, Social History of Medicine, 2012, 25, 589–607, 592. 9 Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, ‘Bioprospecting and Resistance: Transforming Poisoned Arrows into Strophantin Pills in Colonial Gold Coast, 1885–1922’, Social History of Medicine, 2008, 21, 269–90, 278. For recent research into the pharmaceutical properties of arrow poisons, see Shameem Sultana Syeda et al., ‘Design, Synthesis, and In Vitro and In Vivo Evaluation of Ouabain Analogues as Potent and Selective Na,K-ATPase Α4 Isoform Inhibitors for Male Contraception’, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, 2018, 61,1800–20; Deepak Kumar Semwal et al., ‘From Arrow Poison to Herbal Medicine--the Ethnobotanical, Phytochemical and Pharmacological Significance of Cissampelos (Menispermaceae)’, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 2014, 155, 1011–28. 10 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 70–74; Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley’, in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 343–68, 348. 11 Compare to Michel Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, in John Law, ed., Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, Sociological Review Monograph 32 (London ; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 196–233. For analysis of the agency question in ANT and its critique, see Edwin Sayes, ‘Actor-Network Theory and Methodology: Just What Does It Mean to Say That Nonhumans Have Agency?’, Social Studies of Science, 2014, 44, 134–49. 12 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3–63, 5. For example, Gabriela Soto Laveaga illuminates Mexico’s social and political relations through following the move of wild yam from the jungles to scientific laboratories and to the end users. Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009). 13 Sergio Sismondo, ‘Science and Technology Studies and an Engaged Program’, in Edward J. Hackett et al., eds, The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edn (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 13–32, 17. 14 Sheila Jasanoff terms the process of co-construction of technology and social order co-production. Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society’, in Sheila Jasanoff, ed., States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13–55. 15 Cori Hayden, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1; Cori Hayden, ‘From Market to Market: Bioprospecting’s Idioms of Inclusion’, American Ethnologist, 2003, 30, 359–71, 359. 16 Osseo-Asare, ‘Bioprospecting and Resistance’, 272. 17 Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 7. 18 Ibid., 74. 19 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: New York: Routledge, 2007), 15. 20 Richard Harry Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), xv. 21 Norman G. Bisset, ‘War and Hunting Poisons of the New World. Part 1. Notes on the Early History of Curare’, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 1992, 36, 1–26, 4; Sykes and Bunker, Anaesthesia and the Practice of Medicine, 106, 110. On Charles Marie de la Condamine’ experiments with curare, see Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 155. 22 Lloyd G. Stevenson, The Meaning of Poison (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1959), 30. One commentator suggested that these were all mispronunciations of the poison’s local name (uiraery) prevalent in some areas, composed ostensibly from the words ‘bird’ and ‘kill’. Kenneth Bryn Thomas, Curare: Its History and Usage (London: Pitman, 1964), 21. Explorer Robert H. Schomburgk reported that urari was the name of the plant out of which the poison was subtracted. Robert H. Schomburgk, ‘On the Urari, the Arrow Poison of the Indians of Guiana: With a Description of the Plant from Which it is Extracted’, The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Zoology, Botany and Geology, 1841, 7, 407–26, 410; The same claim was made in ‘Mysterious Poison’, Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, 1851, 415–16, 415. 23 This article will follow Norman Bisset’s identification of Europeans’ references to curare. Bisset, ‘War and Hunting Poisons of the New World’. 24 About the history of curare prior to the imperial expeditions and its distribution, see Berta G. Ribeiro and Jose Carvalho, ‘Curare: A Weapon for Hunting and Warfare’, in Daniel Bovet et al., eds, Curare and Curare-Like Agents (New York: Elsevier Pub. Co., 1959), 34–52. 25 Richard Evans Schultes and Robert Francis Raffauf, The Healing Forest: Medicinal and Toxic Plants of the Northwest Amazonia (Portland: Dioscorides Press, 1990), 265; Ribeiro and Carvalho, ‘Curare: A Weapon for Hunting and Warfare’, 34. 26 Edward Bancroft, An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana, in South America: Containing a Description of Many Curious Productions in the Animal and Vegetable Systems of That Country (London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1769), 288; Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1827), 516–20. 27 Ribeiro and Carvalho, ‘Curare: A Weapon for Hunting and Warfare’, 35. 28 Bancroft, An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana, 283. 29 Ibid., 284. 30 Ibid., 287. 31 Ibid., 306. 32 Ibid., 296. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 289. 35 Ibid., 293. 36 Ibid., 300. 37 Benjamin Collins Brodie, ‘Experiments and Observations on the Different Modes in Which Death Is Produced by Certain Vegetable Poisons’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1811, 101, 178–208, 194. 38 Ibid., 194. On the source of the samples, see also Sykes and Bunker, Anaesthesia and the Practice of Medicine, 112. 39 Brodie, ‘Experiments and Observations’, 195. 40 Edward Klein et al., eds, Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1873), 121, 239. On the instrumental use of curare, see also Thomas Lauder Brunton, ‘Lectures on the Experimental Investigation of the Action of Medicines’, The British Medical Journal, 1871, 1, 521–24, 522; Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 81. 41 ‘Charles Waterton, ESQ’, Illustrated London News, 1844, 121, 124. 42 Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America (London: Macmillan, 1879), 129. 43 Claude Bernard, ‘Études Physiologiques sur Quelques Poisons Américains’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1864, 53, 164–91, 169; According to another account, he received the sample in 1845. Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (J. B. Baillière et fils, 1865), 276. For English, see Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley Green (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 157. 44 Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 157. See also, John Black, ‘Claude Bernard on the Action of Curare’, British Medical Journal, 1999, 319, 622. 45 Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les effets des substances toxiques et médicamenteuses (Paris: J. B. Baillière et fils, 1857), 333. My English translation from Claude Bernard, ‘Leçons Sur Les Effects Des Substances Toxiques et Medicamenteuses’, International Anesthesiology Clinics, 1968, 6, 431–70. 46 Bernard, Leçons Sur Les Effects, International Anesthesiology Clinics, 443. 47 Ibid., 447. In 1944, scientists at Burroughs Wellcome self-tested curare and testified they could feel pain. Lawrence K. Altman, Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 80. 48 Bernard, Leçons Sur Les Effects, International Anesthesiology Clinics, 446–47. 49 Thomas Lauder Brunton, ‘The Goulstonian Lectures on Pharmacology and its Relation to Therapeutics’, The British Medical Journal, 1877, 1, 315–18, 317. 50 For situating Bernard’s curare experiments within the broader medical history of pain, see Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 202–04. 51 Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals, 81. 52 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 31. 53 Claude Bernard, ‘Études Physiologiques sur Quelques Poisons Américains’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1864, 53, 164. English translation from Stevenson, The Meaning of Poison, 39. Bernard’s teacher, French physiologist François Magendie, developed the use of poisons as tools in research and set the ground for using curare in that way. Stevenson, ibid., 38. 54 Brunton, ‘Lectures on the Experimental Investigation’, 542, 521–24, 522. 55 Klein, Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory, 121, 239. On the reaction to the book and its impact on 19th-century vivisection debate, see Richard French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 48; Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals, 89. 56 Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 157. 57 Brunton, ‘Lectures on the Experimental Investigation’, 522. 58 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 157–66; Hilda Kean, ‘The “Smooth Cool Men of Science”: The Feminist and Socialist Response to Vivisection’, History Workshop Journal, 1995, 40, 16–38. 59 Greg Murrie, ‘“Death-in-Life”: Curare, Restrictionism and Abolitionism in Victorian and Edwardian Anti-Vivisectionist Thought’, in Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, eds, Animal Death (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013), 257. In France, English anti-vivisectionist Anna Kingsford wrote against Bernard’s and his students’ experiments with curare, see Michael R. Finn, ‘Dogs and Females: Vivisection, Feminists and the Novelist Rachilde’, French Cultural Studies, 2012, 23, 190–201, 193. For more about vivisection and British colonialism, see Pratik Chakrabarti, ‘Beasts of Burden: Animals and Laboratory Research in Colonial India’, History of Science, 2010, 48, 125–51; Peter Hobbins, Venomous Encounters: Snakes, Vivisection and Scientific Medicine in Colonial Australia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 60 About Cross’s selection process for the Royal Commission, see French, Antivivisection and Medical Science, 92–96. 61 Report of the Royal Commission on the Practice of Subjecting Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes; with Minutes of Evidence and Appendix (London: Eyre & W. Spottiswoode, 1876), vii. 62 Ibid., 285. For an illuminating analyses of the testimonies about curare, see Daniel Hoffman, ‘Fatal Attractions: Curare-Based Arrow Poisons, from Medical Innovation to Lethal Injection’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2009), 123–86; Murrie, ‘Death-in-Life’, 264–66. 63 Royal Commission Report, 188. 64 Ibid., 189. 65 Ibid., 238. 66 Ibid., 21–22. 67 Ibid., 22. 68 Ibid., 68. 69 Ibid., 152. 70 Ibid., 60. 71 Ibid., 153. About pain in the Royal Commission, see Rob Boddice, ‘Species of Compassion: Aesthetics, Anaesthetics, and Pain in the Physiological Laboratory’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2012, 15, 3–6. 72 Ibid., 204–05; see also Susan Hamilton, Animal Welfare & Anti-Vivisection 1870–1910: Frances Power Cobbe (New York: Routledge, 2004), xx. 73 Royal Commission Report, 91. 74 Ibid., 262. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., xix. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 239. 80 Cruelty to Animals Bill (HL) (Bill 250, 1876). 81 229 Parl. Deb. (3rd ser.) (1876) 1007. 82 Ibid.,1031. 83 ‘General Council of Medical Education and Registration’, BMJ, 1876, 1, 689–700, 696. 84 Ibid. 85 Editorial, The Manchester Guardian (20 May 1876), 7. 86 230 Parl. Deb. (3rd ser.) (1876) 122. 87 Graham Burnett shows the active role of courts and legislators in shaping the relationship between science and society, particularly in relations to understandings of the natural world. Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 88 On drafting the bill, see French, Antivivisection and Medical Science, 112–44. 89 Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876, 39&40 Vic., c. 77, Section 4. 90 232 Parl. Deb. (3rd ser.) (1877) 634. 91 Minute, 28 December 1896, HO 144/338/B12256, TNA. 92 Stephen Paget to Kenelm Digby, 1 June 1898, HO 144/338/B12256, TNA. 93 Bernard Coleridge, ‘Commentary on the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876’, The Zoophilist, 1883, 2, 201–04, 203. 94 Frances Power Cobbe, Light in Dark Places (London: Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, with the International Association. for the Suppression of Vivisection, 1883), 6. Cobbe also criticised Bernard’s indifference to the pain of animal under curare. Ibid., 7. 95 Royal Commission on Vivisection, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Vivisection (London: Wyman and Sons, 1912), ii. 96 Coleridge to Soares, 25 May 1906, HO 114/2, TNA. 97 Royal Commission on Vivisection, Final Report, 51. 98 Ibid., 61. 99 Sir M. Chalmers, Memo, 14 January 1908, HO 45/10521/138422, TNA. 100 Royal Commission on Vivisection, Final Report, 61. 101 Ibid., 64. 102 Sydney Littlewood et al., Report of the Departmental Committee on Experiments on Animals (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1965), 45. 103 Ibid., 46. 104 It is unclear in how many experiments inspectors were present. Decades later, it was declared that inspectors rarely attended experiments in which curare was used. Ibid., 46. 105 Ibid., 62. 106 Roy M. Humble, ‘The Gill-Merrill Expedition: Penultimate Chapter in the Curare Story’, Anesthesiology: The Journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, 1982, 57, 519–26, 520. 107 A. E. Bennett, ‘How “Indian Arrow Poison” Curare Became a Useful Drug’, Anesthesiology: The Journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, 1967, 28, 446–52, 447. The standardisation method of curare is described in Roger F. Varney, Charles R. Linegar and Horace A. Holaday, ‘The Assay of Curare by the Rabbit “Head-Drop” Method’, Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, 1949, 97, 72–83. For Richard Gill’s own account on his search for curare, see Richard Gill, White Water and Black Magic (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1940). 108 Thandla Raghavendra, ‘Neuromuscular Blocking Drugs: Discovery and Development’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2002, 95, 363–67, 364. 109 By 1948, over 1.5 million animals were used in experiments, and it increased constantly. Littlewood Report, 13, 55. 110 Statement by the Home Secretary on 30 November 1962, Littlewood Report, Appendix III, 208. 111 Littlewood Report, 1 112 Ibid., 61. 113 Ibid., 62. 114 Ibid. 115 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, 1986, c. 14, Section 17. 116 Consolidated version of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, 1986, c. 14, Section 17. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/308593/ConsolidatedASPA1Jan2013.pdf (accessed on 24 January 2019). 117 The materiality of transported plants often accompanied with know-how. Judith A. Carney shows how, as part of the Columbian Exchange, Africans not only imported seeds to the Americas but also the knowledge of their cultivation and domestication. Judith A. Carney, ‘African Rice in the Columbian Exchange’, The Journal of African History, 2001, 42, 377–96, 391. Acknowledgements I thank Harriet Ritvo, Christopher Capozzola, Stefan Helmreich, Clapperton Mavhunga and Craig Wilder as well as the participants at the Graduate Students Seminar at MIT (2012); Northeast Environmental History Conference at Yale University (2012); John McNeil and the Environmental History Workshop at Georgetown University (2014) for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks to Mark Nesbitt and Miriam Hopkinson from Kew Royal Botanical Gardens. The anonymous reviewers for this paper provided constructive insights and I am most grateful for them. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Curare: The Poisoned Arrow that Entered the Laboratory and Sparked a Moral Debate
JF - Social History of Medicine
DO - 10.1093/shm/hky124
DA - 2019-02-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/curare-the-poisoned-arrow-that-entered-the-laboratory-and-sparked-a-C0gcdiAKk3
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -