Читать книгу From Poison Arrows to Prozac - Stanley Feldman - Страница 15

Waterton enjoyed showing visitors to Walton Hall his collection of wild and stuffed animals. Because of his interest in natural science, he mixed widely in the scientific community. He was a close friend of Professor Sewell, who was the president of the Veterinary College; they were both members of the Royal Society. It is probable that it was through his friendship with Sewell that he met Sir Benjamin Brodie (1783–1862), a distinguished surgeon, who was also a member of the society.

Brodie was a close friend of the eminent naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Charles Darwin on the voyages of the Beagle and who became president of the Royal Society. It would have been natural for them to have shared an interest in Waterton’s accounts of his adventures in the jungles of South America and of his observations on the lethal effect of the arrow poison. About this time Brodie had been studying the effects on the body of various poisons and later went on to publish his observations in a well received paper on ‘The Effects of Certain Vegetable Poisons’. It is generally assumed that Waterton supplied Brodie with samples of the wourali poison that he used in his experiments when he returned to England after his first journey to the New World in 1812; but Brodie makes no reference to this in his dissertations and gives credit to a Dr Bancroft as being the source of the poison.

Brodie was altogether a different sort of person from Waterton. Whereas Waterton was flamboyant and adventurous, Brodie was conservative and cautious. He was a deeply ambitious man who from an early stage set his eyes on achieving great office. He was related to the Lord Chief Justice, who played a prominent role in the prosecution of Queen Caroline.

Unlike the dilettante Waterton, Brodie was said to have been ‘consumed with a rage for work’. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1810 while an assistant surgeon to St George’s Hospital in London. He was appointed surgeon to the hospital in 1822. He attended King George IV and became his medical confidant, spending hours, at a time, at his bedside. He became president of the Royal Society and the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London (now, after a royal charter and mergers, the Royal Society of Medicine) and was the first president of the newly formed General Medical Council. He was made president of the College of Surgeons in 1844 and contributed many specimens to its anatomical museum.

Brodie was an experienced anatomist and surgeon. His most famous work was on injuries and infection of bony joints. This led to a more conservative approach being adopted in the treatment of bony fractures and infections. He is remembered today for the eponymous Brodie’s abscess, a painful swelling of a bone caused by a chronic infection. His papers tell of his investigations into the influence of the brain on the action of the heart, the actions of poisons as well his studies on bones and fractures.

Some two years after he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, he enthralled its members with his now famous demonstration of the action of the vegetable poison wourali. It is typical of the man that, before performing in front of this illustrious audience, he privately carried out similar experiments on small animals to make sure the demonstration would be successful. He described in two papers, given to the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, experiments he carried out with wourali on guinea pigs, cats and rabbits. Once convinced he could reproduce its effects, he arranged for the demonstration before the members of the Royal Society in London in 1812.

In this experiment it is reported that he brought a ‘she ass’ into the lecture theatre. He showed that the arrow poison, which on this occasion he termed ‘woorari’, killed its victim. It is recorded in the minutes of the society that, shortly after the injection of a small dose of woorari into the leg of an ass, it caused the animal to become paralysed and to stop breathing.

He performed an immediate tracheostomy, an operation with which every surgeon was well practised in the days of diphtheria, and inserted a domestic bellows into the animal’s windpipe. This allowed him to maintain the animal’s life by inflating its lungs with air (in this he was 140 years ahead of his time, for it was only during the polio epidemic of the 1950s that positive-pressure artificial ventilation was used to overcome respiratory paralysis). The minutes of the society state that ‘he restored the life to a she ass poisoned by woorari by rhythmically pumping air into the animal’s lungs for two hours’. It is also recorded that the animal survived the experience and lived content for several years after the experiment.

It was by means of this demonstration that Brodie showed how curare killed its victim. Unlike other more common poisons, it did not kill by poisoning the brain or the heart but by causing paralysis of the muscles of respiration, resulting in death from asphyxia.

Although there is good evidence that Charles Waterton also performed a similar experiment on an ass he called ‘Wouralia’ with a similarly successful outcome at about the same time, he failed to convince the scientific community of the importance of his observation. This may have been due to the lack of public awareness of his experiment, but is more likely to have been due to scientific scepticism concerning his work. Although there is some uncertainty as to whether Brodie or Waterton was the first to demonstrate that artificial ventilation was capable of maintaining life in animals poisoned with curare, Brodie’s presentation at the end of 1812 was undoubtedly more scientifically significant than the anecdotal account of Waterton’s experiment.