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

"At a time when poison was widely feared as a harming agent and as the root of deadly diseases like plague, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. Doctors developed their experimental protocols for European princes and elites as an explicit contrast to the marketplace shows put on by those who sold cure-alls through dramatic displays. As they created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, physicians devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. By reconstructing the history of the antidote trials, Rankin reveals how they generated extensive engagement with "experimental thinking" in the century before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century. The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power"--
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.