The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science

by Alisha Rankin

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story.

At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend.

The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medical

337 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is obvious that this author put a huge amount of time and effort into the research of this book, and for that, kudos. In my opinion though, the level of detail and redundancy gets to a point where it detracts from the message. As a pharmacist, I am no stranger to reading detailed and complicated literature, but I generally do not want to put forth the same amount of effort when reading for pleasure.

I kept waiting for the part in the book where there would be some kind of explanation about how most of these "antidotes", regardless of whether they were promoted by physicians or charlatans, were bogus. I had hoped to get a little more information on the antidotes themselves- what they actually contained, if there was evidence of them being efficacious outside of trials performed by the creators (or members of royalty wanting to show off), etc. The vast majority of "physicians" during renaissance times were essentially charlatans anyway as no one really knew what they were doing up until the 19th century. When someone who actually published claims to having knowledge on what unicorns looked like and what they ate was cited as a "physician", it cheapened the term for the entire book. I cannot say I see any doctors prescribing theriac, unicorn horns, or bezoar stones in my day-to-day practice.

Overall, this was an interesting book to read and I learned some new things from it. For me it was the kind of book to read small amounts of over time instead of all of it in a few days.

[Platypus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book that reveals a hitherto untold story of poison trials in 16th-century Europe (Italy, Germany, and the Holy Roman Empire). These trials on condemned criminals, though ephemeral in history, reveal much on the spirit of experimentation, medical ethics, and varied ways of presenting evidence to claim medical authority among different types of healers in society.

[LaanSiBB]

Bit dense, was expecting more narratives

[Elley]

Super interesting read that informed my knowledge on where science/ethics are today