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Acknowledgements
Contents
Preface
The story of curare
Postscript
Prologue
Curare
The South American Arrow Poison
Christopher Columbus
The Columbus trail
The arrow poison
Unravelling the Mystery
Charles Watertom (Fig 5)
Benjamin Brodie (Fig 6)
What is the arrow poison?
Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard and medicine
Claude Bernard and curare
After Bernard
Dangerous Remedies
Rabies and tetanus
Therapeutic use of curare
Curare in patients
Thomas Spencer Wells and tetanus (Fig 12)
Curare in other convulsive states
The Controversy
The electrical theory
Charles Scott Sherrington
Otto Loewi and Henry Dale. The chemical theory
The Cambridge connection
Otto Loewi
Henry Dale (Fig 14)
The messenger system
Neher and Sackman
Serendipity
The accident
The expedition
Purifying the curare
The chemistry of curare
Curare in Anaesthesia. Intocostrin
Lewis Wright
Initial trials in anaesthesia
The breakthrough
A Milestone in Anaesthesia
Curare use in Europe and America
Present-day practice
The control of ventilation
Artificial ventilation
Problems. Complications
The Beecher and Todd report
Neostigmine-resistant curarisation
Research into neostigmine-resistant curarisation
Acid/base balance
Awareness during anaesthesia
Failure of reversal
Unanswered Questions
The puzzle
Effect of kidney failure in animals
The isolated arm
The Way Forward
The problem
The isolated-arm experiments
Measuring blood concentrations
The role of the plasma concentration
A brainwave
The hypothesis
The Mongoose and the Snake
Other animals
The evolution of receptors
New Drugs. New drugs
The ideal drug
Lessons Learned
Curare and the brain
Artificial ventilation
Lessons from curarisation
Epilogue
Chemical transmitters
Further Reading and References
Bibliography
Papers and abstracts
Copyright
When the first edition of this book, Poison Arrows, was published in 2005 it was warmly welcomed by the scientific press and those with an interest in medicine and physiology. It was the subject of BBC science programmes. The publisher, John Blake, insisted the story was too interesting and too important not to be accessible to a much wider audience of lay readers. And he persuaded me to write From Poison Arrows to Prozac.
In writing this book I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Stuart Robertson, of John Blake Publishing, whose suggestions and criticism have helped shape it; the assistance of my ever-critical proofreader, my wife Carole, and the patience of my friends, who have provided information, and my colleagues at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, who served as guinea pigs for many of the experiments described in the book.
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2 It has been suggested that primitive peptide nucleic acid reached earth on meteorites and from the large amounts of interstellar dust that rained down upon its surface after it was formed. Meteorites and interstellar dust contain a high concentration of organic chemicals, including amino acids and purines, the precursors of DNA.
A combination of missionary zeal and the lure of gold led to further expeditions in the years following Columbus’s return from his first voyage to the New World. Very soon Spanish colonies were established on the island of Hispaniola and at Darien, on the southern end of the Panama isthmus. It was from this latter colony that Hernán Cortés led his expedition to the land of Montezuma and the Aztecs, in what is now Mexico. He sent back gold and silver treasure to King Charles in Spain as evidence of the riches to be found in the New World.
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