Fatal attractions: Curare-based arrow poisons, from medical innovation to lethal injection.

摘要

In the late-1930s and early 1940s, the American pharmaceutical industry launched the first modern paralyzing drugs based on indigenous South-American arrow-poisons (curare). Their advent was celebrated by biomedicine, and their utility as adjuncts to surgical anesthesia is undeniable. This dissertation, however, follows several lesser- known, yet troubling paths of paralyzing agents once in Western hands. This study begins by challenging representations which juxtaposed the new, modern drugs to their untamed and dangerous origins, proclaiming a beneficent future in biomedicine. From there, the dissertation revisits the nineteenth-century dispute over the use of curare in animal experimentation, particularly in Britain, giving special attention to the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection. By exploring the legal and cultural discourses that emerged at that time, the dissertation shows how curare was transformed from a tool of scientific inquiry into an emblem of cruelty, a cause for social action, and a demand for government restriction. The dissertation then shifts focus to the specific problems of curarizing drugs and human subjects, beginning with early clinical forays against tetanus and hydrophobia, contemporary to the antivivisection debate, and then describing ethically-problematic roles for paralyzing drugs with human subjects in the twentieth-century, giving special emphasis to paralyzing drugs in convulsive shock therapy, in the chemical suffocation of "behavior-modification" experiments, and finally in the lethal-injection protocol of United States capital punishment. The dissertation concludes that the current controversy over paralyzing drugs in lethal injection has largely overlooked a rich and critically relevant history of earlier controversies with similar chemical agents. Together, they speak not only to the politics, history and ethics of human and animal-subjects experimentation, but also to the unique powers and dangers of paralyzing agents which can abet cruelty, hide excruciating pain, and deflect empathy. The episodes described in this dissertation are offered as a necessary foreground and counterpoint to the current use of paralyzing drugs in United States capital punishment.