How did ancient people use venoms as medicine. Which issues were they treating and how did venom work to achieve that ?
In: 1
Are you talking about microdosing venoms to slowly become immune?
Most historic accounts of venom in (not *as*) medicine are a lot like what we continue to do nowadays; using them to generate antivenoms in animals that can then be given to counteract the original venom. Or as someone else mentions, you could carefully take tiny amounts of a toxin to generate that immunity yourself.
Beyond that, toxic substances generally are toxic because they interfere with some physiological process. In particular conditions, repressing some process can be beneficial… but good luck figuring that out *and* finding a toxin that can do that, in a non-toxic dosage, before the age of modern medicine (hint: innovation in medicine used to involve a lot more trial and error).
Nowadays though, drug design/discovery occasionally takes inspiration from natural toxins to create new version that have a useful level of potency, more restricted effects and other desireable properties.
Just because ancient peoples used something as medicine doesn’t mean it really worked. A lot of the time, if anything produced an obvious physiological response (vomiting, pain, a change in color, anything really) that would be taken as evidence that it was “working,” even if in reality the substance was doing nothing or making things worse.
Ancient people knew what animal venom was and knew it had the power to harm, so they probably assumed it also had the power to heal any number of totally unrelated ailments. Scientific study of venom, including the production of antivenom, didn’t happen until the 19th century.
Small amounts of venom produce an enormous physiological response, which can be positive in certain situations. For example, race horses have often been “doped” with cobra venom to markedly increase acute performance.
Toad “venom” 5-meo-dmt has a history of human use, and dolphins get intoxicated on fish venoms. There’s probably medicinal venom use across cultures into prehistory. Chinese alchemy is a good place to start searching for this stuff – 10k recipes of herbs, venoms, frozen tears etc.
Latest Answers