Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado — the curare chapter (Madrid, 1745)

The natural history of the Orinoco written by the Jesuit mission superior Joseph Gumilla and printed at Madrid in a revised second edition in 1745. Its twelfth chapter is the first extended European account of curare, and it gets the decisive pharmacological point right — the poison is harmless swallowed and lethal in a wound. The same volume attributes the discovery of it to the devil, on the ground that the Indians who made it lacked the judgement to.