From Poison Arrows to Prozac. Stanley Feldman
men of his era, became interested in natural science. This interest was heightened by his experiences on his journeys in Guyana and his expeditions in both South and North America (he was particularly taken with the civility and elegance of the Americans and with the handsome buildings that lined Broadway in New York).
He describes how, with the help of the slave Dadi, he set about collecting animals and birds, with the minimum of damage, so that they could be dissected and preserved. It was due to his skill at taxidermy, using mercuric chloride to harden and preserve the skin, that he was able to establish a huge collection of preserved (he insists none of the specimens were stuffed) exotic animals and birds, including monkeys, sloths, parrots and alligators for his menagerie at Walton Hall.
His enthusiasm as a collector knew no bounds. He describes how he was determined to capture a large cayman and how, after several attempts to snare the animal using a large hook baited with meat, he eventually came up with a special device consisting of a pole armed with many hooks, like a cat-o’-nine-tails. When, after many nights of anticipation, the animal took the baited hook and was impaled, he leaped onto its back as it was pulled to the riverbank.
The animal was duly dissected and preserved and can be seen to this day in the museum at Wakefield. The account given by one of the Indians who assisted in this capture suggests that it had its head in a snare and was half dead when this particular episode occurred. On another occasion Waterton wrote of how he fought with a huge snake, which all but squeezed the life out of him, in order to overcome it and add it to his collection. He describes his disappointment at failing to have himself bitten by a ‘vampire’ (blood-sucking bat) in spite of sleeping exposed for several nights.
During his various journeys he suffered from repeated bouts of malaria and had few qualms about bleeding himself to relieve the ensuing fever. He sustained several quite serious injuries during his adventures and endured extremes of temperature and humidity. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Waterton travelled without personal servants, relying on assistance from the natives. He carried no tent, only a sheet under which he sheltered when it rained and when he needed to carry out his dissections of the animals he had captured.
There is no doubt that Charles Waterton was a strong, brave man and a fearless adventurer, but he was not above using exaggeration in his stories so as to make them more exciting for the reader. This had the unfortunate effect of making the scientific community suspicious of many of his observations and confirming his reputation as an oddball. This reputation was not helped by the reports from visitors to Walton Hall that, on occasions, Waterton would sit under the table growling and pretending to be a dog. On one occasion, while in his dog persona, he is said to have bitten the leg of a visitor. It is reported that he tried to fly and launched himself off the roof of an outhouse, proclaiming he was ‘navigating the atmosphere’; while his physician Dr Hobson tells of coming across the seventy-seven-year-old Waterton scratching the back of his head with the big toe of his right foot in the manner of a monkey.
Because of these oddities it is easy to dismiss Waterton’s achievements, but his contributions to science are real and show evidence of a talent for detailed scientific observation.
In his studies on the behaviour of birds he records 119 species that he found in the grounds of Walton Hall. His efforts at animal and bird conservation and his descriptions of the feeding, mating and behaviour of birds, and the exclusively arboreal habitat of the sloth, have stood the test of time. The description he gave in his reports of the different species of monkey demonstrate his patience and objectivity as an observer of animal life.
He built a 9-foot-high wall around the 3-mile perimeter of Walton Hall (he said he paid for it from the wine he did not drink!) in order to allow him to establish, what was probably the world’s first nature reserve, on his estate. He fought the first legal battle in England over an environmental issue. He accused his neighbour, a soap manufacturer, Mr Simpson, of polluting his lake. Unfortunately, he died before he had the satisfaction of having the nuisance removed to another part of Wakefield, by court order. However, he will always be remembered for his interest in wourali (curare), for without him and the specimens of the poison he brought back to England this story might not have progressed as it did.
Waterton made four separate voyages to the New World. In Wanderings in South America he gives an account of his journeys. It contains a detailed description of the effects of the South American arrow poison. He described seeing a wild pig killed by the natives using poisoned arrows. He tells of the manner of the pig’s death in some detail: ‘It affects the nervous system and thus destroys the vital functions of the body… the pig managed less than 200 paces before it dropped dead.’
After his second journey, he brought a large sample of wourali back with him to England. He used some of this specimen in an experiment on an ass. He injected a dose of the poison into a leg of the animal after tying a ligature around the leg a little above the site of the injection. He observed that ‘the animal walked about as usual, and ate his food as though he were well. After an hour had elapsed, the bandage was untied and ten minutes later death overtook him.’
Waterton is not forgotten, and the Waterton Society helps to keep alive the legacy of this truly remarkable eccentric
Benjamin Brodie (Fig 6)
Waterton enjoyed showing visitors to Walton Hall his collection of wild and stuffed animals. Because of his interest in natural science, he mixed widely in the scientific community. He was a close friend of Professor Sewell, who was the president of the Veterinary College; they were both members of the Royal Society. It is probable that it was through his friendship with Sewell that he met Sir Benjamin Brodie (1783–1862), a distinguished surgeon, who was also a member of the society.
Brodie was a close friend of the eminent naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Charles Darwin on the voyages of the Beagle and who became president of the Royal Society. It would have been natural for them to have shared an interest in Waterton’s accounts of his adventures in the jungles of South America and of his observations on the lethal effect of the arrow poison. About this time Brodie had been studying the effects on the body of various poisons and later went on to publish his observations in a well received paper on ‘The Effects of Certain Vegetable Poisons’. It is generally assumed that Waterton supplied Brodie with samples of the wourali poison that he used in his experiments when he returned to England after his first journey to the New World in 1812; but Brodie makes no reference to this in his dissertations and gives credit to a Dr Bancroft as being the source of the poison.
Brodie was altogether a different sort of person from Waterton. Whereas Waterton was flamboyant and adventurous, Brodie was conservative and cautious. He was a deeply ambitious man who from an early stage set his eyes on achieving great office. He was related to the Lord Chief Justice, who played a prominent role in the prosecution of Queen Caroline.
Unlike the dilettante Waterton, Brodie was said to have been ‘consumed with a rage for work’. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1810 while an assistant surgeon to St George’s Hospital in London. He was appointed surgeon to the hospital in 1822. He attended King George IV and became his medical confidant, spending hours, at a time, at his bedside. He became president of the Royal Society and the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London (now, after a royal charter and mergers, the Royal Society of Medicine) and was the first president of the newly formed General Medical Council. He was made president of the College of Surgeons in 1844 and contributed many specimens to its anatomical museum.
Brodie was an experienced anatomist and surgeon. His most famous work was on injuries and infection of bony joints. This led to a more conservative approach being adopted in the treatment of bony fractures and infections. He is remembered today for the eponymous Brodie’s abscess, a painful swelling of a bone caused by a chronic infection. His papers tell of his investigations into the influence of the brain on the action of the heart, the actions of poisons as well his studies on bones and fractures.
Some two years after he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, he enthralled its members with his now famous demonstration of the action of the vegetable poison wourali. It is typical of the man that, before performing in front of this illustrious