Peter Hobbins, Venomous Encounters: Snakes, Vivisection and Scientific Medicine in Colonial Australia

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The year 2017 saw a remarkable surge of scholarly publications on the history of medical-zoological engagement with snakes and their venoms across different geographical and cultural locations.1 Amongst these fresh and important contributions, Peter Hobbins’s Venomous Encounters is an exquisite attempt to illuminate the hitherto overlooked features of ‘toxic histories’ by foregrounding the presence of venomous snakes in colonial Australia and their potency in shaping the meanings and boundaries of ‘scientific medicine’ from 1788 to 1914.2 Written clearly, Hobbins’s book explores the fascinating story of colonial encounters and vivisectional experimentations with animals and their toxins, specifically through the scientific characterisation of snakes and the nature, composition and action of their venoms. In doing so, it quite compellingly demonstrates the ubiquity of non-humans in the antipodean toxicological research culture. Hobbins’s book is neatly arranged into six main chapters, a well-knit introduction and a pithy concluding section. In these six chapters, in a chronological and elaborate thematic order, the author embarks on an ambitious effort to ‘rewrite beasts back into consideration, both as sentient beings and as integral participants in the emergent structures of colonial science’ (p.164). The introduction effectively sets up the historical context for further discussions particularly relating to ‘vivisection’—including the prominent and widespread practice of empirical testing of venom in familiar animals to ascertain the intensity of envenomation—which emerged as a new thread of empiricism, especially after 1840, and was frequently undertaken by both lay and professional medical practitioners throughout the Australian colonies. This practice justified huge animal sufferings and deaths and yet was regarded as ethically unproblematic, as practitioners denied moral considerations for non-humans involved in experimental pathology.