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Abstract
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It was a time of contagion and quacks. A Machiavellian power-broker keen to protect his position defied tradition to sponsor controlled experiments on the most marginalized of people.
It was 1524. The Italian surgeon Gregorio Caravita offered Pope Clement VII a medicinal oil he had prepared as an antidote to poison. There were good reasons for the pope to fear poisoning. So, instead of dismissing Caravita's unlikely claim, he decided to have the concoction tested -- on condemned prisoners.
Two Corsicans -- convicted of theft and murder -- were chosen. Doctors fed them marzipan cakes laced with deadly aconite. When they started to writhe and scream in agony, Caravita anointed one of them with his oil. The treated prisoner survived. As a reward for his services, the prisoner had his death sentence commuted to life as a galley slave. The untreated prisoner? It took four hours of torment for him to die.
The next trial of Caravita's oil was carried out by the papal physician, the papal pharmacist and a Roman senator. The officials wanted to check that they had not been tricked, and to see whether the antidote worked against other poisons. They administered a mixture of raw eggs, sugar and arsenic to a man from Mantua who had been condemned for murder. He, too, survived to live out his days as a galley slave.
Two weeks later, the experimenters published a four-page report of the trials, describing effects of the poisons and emphasizing the presence of "pious men" who prayed on the convicts' behalf. (Without knowing the exact content of the oil, and the exact doses of the poisons, it is impossible today to speculate on whether the antidote could really have worked.)
Language: en |