Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Memoria sobre las serpientes — an American snakebite programme that prints its own negative result
The zoologist of the Royal Botanical Expedition of New Granada published in the Semanario a memoir on the snakes of the kingdom and on the remedies for their bites. It sorts the remedies by how they are supposed to act, sets out three experiments to settle what venom is for, asks observers in every province to use Linnaean names — and records that the celebrated guaco failed: a woman bitten on an estate was dosed heavily inside and out and died thirty hours later.
Why this wins its question: Guaco appears in English-language sources as a traditional South American snakebite cure, and colonial Spanish American science appears as botany. This object quotes the memoir of the expedition's zoologist from the page: the division of remedies into mechanical and chemical, the refusal to generalise Fontana's caustic potash across unknown venoms, the three experimental designs for finding out what venom is for, the demand that provincial observers use Linnaean names — and the published case of a bitten enslaved woman who was dosed with guaco inside and out and died at thirty hours, printed by the man whose own programme it embarrassed.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The memoir names itself and its author's office. Page 87 of the 1849 Paris volume of the Semanario heads it "MEMORIA SOBRE LAS SERPIENTES, y plan de observaciones para aclarar la historia natural de las que habitan en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, y para cerciorarse de los verdaderos remedios capaces de favorecer á los que han sido mordidos por las venenosas; por Don Jorge Tadeo Lozano Maldonado de Mendoza, individuo de la real Expedicion Botánica de Santa Fé de Bogotá, y encargado, con real aprobacion, de su parte zoológica." The zoological branch of the crown's botanical expedition was held by a man born in the Indies, and his subject is the animal the public regards "con el mayor espanto y horror".
The memoir is organised by mechanism rather than by recipe. Page 96 divides the remedies into those that act mechanically — whose object is "impedir que se introduzca el veneno y que circule por las partes principales del cuerpo, ó, una vez introducido, extraerlo, si es posible, antes de que se combine con la sangre" — and those that act chemically, which must either combine with the venom and neutralise it or restore "la irritabilidad del sistema nervioso, que es la que principalmente parece ofendida". It reports that the abbé Fontana, on direct experiments with the European viper, announced caustic potash as a powerful antidote, and refuses to generalise from it: "la oscuridad que nos rodea acerca de la naturaleza del veneno de diversas sierpes impide generalizar su aplicacion."
Availability is treated as part of the problem. The same page objects to caustic potash that it cannot be got quickly "en los montes y aldeas casi desiertas de las tierras calientes, donde son mas frecuentes las mordeduras de culebra", and turns to the red quina, "cinchona oblonguifolia. Mut.", which grows there of itself. The 1849 editor adds in a footnote that concentrated lye from ashes, common in country houses, is a substitute for caustic potash and should be used in default of ammonia — an editorial addition, not the author's.
The memoir prints a result against the remedy everyone believed in. Page 95 lists guaco — "el Guaco (especie de cacalia)" — as the one antidote of which it is claimed that it not only cures the bite but that those who drink its juice or decoction daily are preserved from being harmed at all, and says the claim is said to rest on repeated observations. Then: "sé de cierto que á una negra que fué picada por una taya en la hacienda de B… se le aplicó el Guaco por dentro y por fuera en porciones muy considerables, y que, á pesar de las decantadas virtudes de este específico, murió miserablemente á las treinta horas de haberle sucedido aquella desgracia." The woman is unnamed and enslaved; the estate's name is damaged in this copy. A published negative case against a celebrated cure is the memoir's strongest single act, and it cost a life to have.
It is equally hard on the practitioners. Page 94 describes the curanderos, "algunos charlatanes que, sin la menor instruccion y por puro capricho, se dedican á médicos de esta especie de accidentes", and singles out the sucking of the wound as the practice in which their rashness most shines, because bleeding gums give the venom a road into the blood. Page 95 generalises the complaint — "esta importante parte de la medicina está entregada al capricho é ignorancia de los charlatanes curanderos que se gobiernan por una simple rutina" — and argues that antidotes should be administered by someone able to discern the nature of each venom, since what is an antidote in one case may in another "exalte mas su actividad dañosa".
The memoir proposes experiments, and states them as designs. Page 100 asks whether the venom is a weapon or, as the author suspects, "un suplemento para ayudarles á digerir los alimentos en lugar de la masticacion, que no pueden practicar por la estructura de sus dientes", and gives three ways to find out: test whether hunger increases the venom's activity and satiety destroys it; let a hungry snake swallow a bird and then kill the snake to see whether the swallowed animal shows signs of having been poisoned; and, by analogy, assay the saliva and gastric juice of non-venomous snakes for the same deleterious quality. He adds that a venomous snake kept alive after removal of its fangs and their adjacent sacs would settle the question by the state of its digestion.
The plan is distributed and it says why. The same page tells the curious of each province to undertake the work locally, holding "cierta uniformidad en el órden de observar", so that "las tareas reunidas de todos aclaren la historia natural de nuestras serpientes"; it gives as an example that while one man works on the chemical composition of the venom of the taya rabona another may find its true antidote and confirm it "con repetidos experimentos"; and it insists that the work will be worthless if observers go on naming things by local names. Even the modest outcome — merely telling the venomous species from the harmless ones — is presented as "este distinguido servicio á la patria".
What the memoir gets wrong, and how the volume itself marks it. Page 94 argues that a curandero who swallows venom may be poisoned, "pues, segun el abate Fontana en su obra de los venenos, los de las serpientes producen funestos efectos si se toman interiormente"; the 1849 editor footnotes it — "Esta opinion, acreditada entonces, está hoy considerada como errónea: el veneno de las serpientes no obra sino introducido en la circulacion" — and adds that ligature, incision, immediate cauterisation and ammonia are still the most effective measures known. The same distinction between a poison swallowed and a poison in the blood is the one that Gumilla's Orinoco chapter had recorded from the other side sixty-four years earlier.
What this object cannot show. The pages opened do not establish that anyone answered the call for provincial observers, that the three experiments were performed, or that the memoir changed how a single bite was treated. The volume is the 1849 Paris reprint, not the colonial numbers, so the wording and the footnotes are as its editor set them, and the issue and date of first publication are not stated on any page read here.