Reviewed by: The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle of Authority in Renaissance Science by Alisha Rankin Frederick W. Gibbs Alisha Rankin. The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle of Authority in Renaissance Science. Syntheses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 330 pp. $35.00 (978-0-226-74485-8). When thinking about the nature of early modern experiment and knowledge production, the relevance of administering pulverized unicorn horn to condemned [End Page 416] criminals doesn't necessarily spring to mind. Alisha Rankin deftly shows why it should. In Renaissance Europe, poison was a very real threat to those in power (or wanted to be), making effective antidotes to poison a prized possession. But how could one know if a particular antidote actually worked—that it was a truly "authentic" substance naturally endowed with anti-poison properties, or a complex drug that was correctly prepared? What kind of evidence constituted proof of a drug's efficacy? Whom should one trust to make such a determination? While provocatively exploring these questions, Rankin immerses her readers in the early modern world of variegated medical practice, contested medical authority, and competing kinds of evidence. Efficacy of a drug or poison could be known from a number of sources: reasoning through medical theory, written testimony from physicians who had witnessed a drug's effects on patients, deceitful curative demonstrations in public markets, and of course personal experience. In showing how all these interfaced with each other, Rankin also brings to light the particular experience of performing contrived experiments with poisons and antidotes on criminals condemned to death as a way of establishing authoritative medical knowledge. Although focused on the sixteenth century, Rankin carefully situates poison trials in a long medical tradition. The first chapter provides a thorough overview of how thinking about poison and antidotes developed from antiquity through the Renaissance. The concluding seventh chapter shows how interest in poison trials persisted into the seventeenth century and remained significant for the burgeoning field of toxicology, even as poison trials moved from human to animal subjects. The book's three main sections—Authorities, Experiments, and Wonder Drugs—provide a helpful thematic heuristic, but what makes the book so exciting is how these boundaries are constantly blurred within and especially across the various chapters. The chapters at the heart of the book proceed chronologically, each focused on a different trial or antidote. Chapter 2 describes the advent of the early modern poison trials with Pope Clement VII and Caravita's oil, emphasizing how physicians framed trials of antidotes on condemned bodies not as a revolutionary new practice (although there was no recent precedent), but as an extension of the learned medical tradition. Chapter 3 highlights how university-trained physicians (including the well-known Andrea Mattioli) asserted their authority to create medical knowledge by carefully detailing the gruesome effects of poison on the human body and explaining any success or failure of an antidote in order to minimize the legitimacy of public spectacles by charlatans hawking fraudulent drugs. Chapter 4 examines the concerns about using living bodies to test antidotes given the potential disruption to the important social and religious function of providing a pious death to a repentant criminal. Taking a more global approach, Chapter 5 investigates the burgeoning interest in wonder drugs—remedies for basically any malady and especially poison—including bezoars, unicorn horn, terra sigillata, and tobacco—and how medical debates increasingly intersected with growing international commerce and private collections of these supposedly powerful new substances. Chapter 6 uses competing versions of terra sigillata from two rival medical empirics, Andreas Berthold and George am Wald, to illustrate [End Page 417] ow alchemical panaceas further muddied the waters of medical authority and credible evidence in the late sixteenth century. Readers will quickly cherish the vividness that Rankin brings to early modern texts, their authors, and medical debates. Specialists and nonspecialists alike will appreciate Rankin's energetic and conversational prose, as well as the fluidity with which she moves between micro and macro analysis. She weaves together, for instance, careful attention to the language used to describe poison trials—sometimes meticulously descriptive, sometimes curiously imprecise—with the broader cultural contexts of how...
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Jan 1, 2021
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