Rankin, Alisha (Author)
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.
...MoreReview Sabrina Minuzzi (2022) Review of "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science". Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period (pp. 119-122).
Review Anita Guerrini (2023) Review of "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science". Journal of the History of Biology (pp. 207-209).
Review Frederick W. Gibbs (2021) Review of "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 416-418).
Review Molly Taylor-Poleskey (2022) Review of "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 435-436).
Review Hannah Murphy (2022) Review of "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science". Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (pp. 191-193).
Chapter
Bhushan Patwardhan;
Gururaj Mutalik;
Girish Tillu;
(2015)
Drug Discovery and Ayurveda
(/isis/citation/CBB639528782/)
Article
Alisha Rankin;
(2017)
On Anecdote and Antidotes: Poison Trials in Sixteenth-Century Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB721301184/)
Article
Gabriel, Joseph M.;
(2011)
Restricting the Sale of “Deadly Poisons”: Pharmacists, Drug Regulation, and Narratives of Suffering in the Gilded Age
(/isis/citation/CBB001220743/)
Article
Watson, Katherine D.;
(2006)
Medical and Chemical Expertise in English Trials for Criminal Poisoning, 1750--1914
(/isis/citation/CBB000773961/)
Article
Carrasco, Joaquín;
(2012)
Remedios zoológicos comunes en De la Materia Médica de Dioscórides (s. I) y el incunable Hortus sanitatis, De animalibus (s. XV) y su pervivencia en la farmacopea actual
(/isis/citation/CBB001210001/)
Article
Barry Sturman;
David Garrioch;
(2023)
Amateur Science and Innovation in Fireworks in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB895927620/)
Book
Ole Peter Grell;
Andrew Cunningham;
Jon Arrizabalaga;
(2018)
It All Depends on the Dose: Poisons and Medicines in European History
(/isis/citation/CBB800035408/)
Article
Karaberopoulos, Demetrios;
Karamanou, Marianna;
Androutsos, George;
(2012)
The Theriac in Antiquity
(/isis/citation/CBB001200877/)
Article
Gomes, Ana Carolina Vimieiro;
(2012)
“Too Good to Be True”: The Controversy over the Use of Permanganate of Potash as an Antidote to Snake Poison and the Circulation of Brazilian Physiology in the Nineteenth-Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001251108/)
Book
Maimonides, Moses;
Bos, Gerrit;
McVaugh, Michael;
(2009)
On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs
(/isis/citation/CBB001021602/)
Book
Acosta, Cristóbal de;
Rodriguez Nozal, Raul;
Gonzáles Bueno, Antonio;
(2000)
Edición facsímil del Tractado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (Burgos, 1578): Utilidad Comercial y Materia Médica de las Indias Orientales en la Europa Renacentista
(/isis/citation/CBB000358397/)
Article
Alain Touwaide;
(2017)
Renaissance Herbalism. The Perils of Humanism
(/isis/citation/CBB957028410/)
Chapter
Allen Shotwell;
(2020)
Dissection Techniques, Forensics and Anatomy in the 16th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB490300332/)
Book
Francesco Paolo de Ceglia;
(2020)
The Body of Evidence: Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern European Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB516817724/)
Article
Marcum, J. A.;
(2000)
The origin of the dispute over the discovery of heparin
(/isis/citation/CBB000111174/)
Article
Jana Černá;
(2016)
A Powerful Antidote, a Strange Camel and Turkish Pepper: Iberian Science, the Discovery of the New World and the Early Modern Czech Lands
(/isis/citation/CBB119616306/)
Book
Sneader, Walter;
(2005)
Drug Discovery: A History
(/isis/citation/CBB000630351/)
Book
John H. Evans;
(2020)
The Human Gene Editing Debate
(/isis/citation/CBB424000521/)
Book
Friedrich, Christoph;
Bernschneider-Reif, Sabine;
(2003)
Rosarium litterarum: Beiträge zur Pharmazie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift für Peter Dilg zum 65. Geburtstag
(/isis/citation/CBB000780042/)
Article
Y. Srinivasa Rao;
Sindhu Thomas;
(2023)
Indigenous poison healing traditions in Kerala
(/isis/citation/CBB926536478/)
Be the first to comment!