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Curare: the flying death.

The story of how the South American arrow poison, curare, was introduced into medical practice is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of pharmacology. The primitive use of curare is lost in the centuries-old culture of Indians living in the Amazon Basin. The first written historical account about curare was made by the Italian priest Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, who was attached to Queen Isabella’s Spanish court. He chronicled the stories of homecoming explorers from the New World in his great book Rebus Oceanis et Novo Orbe published in 1516 (D’Anghiera 1516). De Orbe Novo contains many references to poisoned arrows and the preparation of curare. It is therefore certain that the Indians used poisoned arrows at the time the Spanish conquistadores reached the New World. However, the arrow and dart poisons were not curare as we understand the term now (Bisset 1992). Today, to the pharmacologists, curare is characterized by a nondepolarizing action at the neuromuscular junction causing relaxation of the skeletal muscle. To the anaesthetists, curare often simply refers to the alkaloid (π)-tubocurarine. The Indians used a blowgun (sarabatana) to deliver darts tipped with curare. The blowgun is basically a hollow tube of cane or wood, usually about 6 feet in length. A dart, wrapped at the proximal end with a wad of cotton, is introduced into one end of the tube, the cotton acting as a piston gasket. The distal end of the dart is impregnated with curare. At conquest times, the use of blowguns extended from northern Bolivia to central Mexico (Riley 1952). The Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Ralegh penetrated deep into British Guiana in search of the fabulous city of Eldorado (Ralegh 1596). Contrary to popular belief, Sir Walter never described curare and was probably totally ignorant of its existence (Carman 1968). Furthermore, Ralegh did not bring arrow poison back to Europe (McIntyre 1947). Alexander von Humboldt was a great German scientist