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Randomness 5: The Deadly Poison That Can Be A Cure!

An excerpt from the Wikipedia article about CURARE:

"Curare was used as a paralyzing poison by South American indigenous people. The prey was shot by arrows or blowgun darts dipped in curare, leading to asphyxiation owing to the inability of the victim's respiratory muscles to contract. The word 'curare' is derived from wurari, from the Carib language of the Macusi Indians of Guyana. Curare is also known among indigenous peoples as Ampi, Woorari, Woorara, Woorali, Wourali, Wouralia, Ourare, Ourari, Urare, Urari, and Uirary.

In 1596, Sir Walter Raleigh mentioned the arrow poison in his book Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (which relates to his travels in Trinidad and Guayana), though the poison he described possibly was not curare.[4] In 1780, Abbe Felix Fontana discovered that it acted on the voluntary muscles rather than the nerves and the heart. In 1832, Alexander von Humboldt gave the first western account of how the toxin was prepared from plants by Orinoco River natives.

During 1811-1812 Sir Benjamin Collins Brody (1783-1862) experimented with curare. He was the first to show that curare does not kill the animal and the recovery is complete if the animal's respiration is maintained artificially. In 1825, Charles Waterton described a classical experiment in which he kept a curarized female donkey alive by artificial respiration with a bellows through a tracheostomy. Waterton is also credited with bringing curare to Europe. Robert Hermann Schomburgk, who was a trained botanist, identified the vine as one of the Strychnos genus and gave it the now accepted name Strychnos toxifera.

George Harley (1829-1896) showed in 1850 that curare (wourali) was effective for the treatment of tetanus and strychnine poisoning. In 1857, Claude Bernard (1813-1878) published the results of his experiments in which he demonstrated that the mechanism of action of curare was a result of interference in the conduction of nerve impulses from the motor nerve to the skeletal muscle, and that this interference occurred at the neuromuscular junction. From 1887, the Burroughs Wellcome catalogue listed under its 'Tabloids' brand name, tablets of curare at 1⁄12 grain (price 8 shillings) for use in preparing a solution for hypodermic injection. In 1914, Henry Hallett Dale (1875-1968) described the physiological actions of acetylcholine. After 25 years, he showed that acetylcholine is responsible for neuromuscular transmission, which can be blocked by curare.

The best known and historically most important (because of its medical applications) toxin is d-tubocurarine. It was isolated from the crude drug - from a museum sample of curare - in 1935 by Harold King (1887-1956) of London, working in Sir Henry Dale's laboratory. He also established its chemical structure. It was introduced into anesthesia in the early 1940s as a muscle relaxant for surgery. Curare is active - toxic or muscle-relaxing, depending on the intended use - only by an injection or a direct wound contamination by poisoned dart or arrow. It is harmless if taken orally because curare compounds are too large and highly charged to pass through the lining of the digestive tract to be absorbed into the blood. For this reason, people can eat curare-poisoned prey safely. In medicine, curare has been superseded by a number of curare-like agents, such as pancuronium, which have a similar pharmacodynamic profile, but fewer side effects."

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