From Arrow Poison to Operating Room

“Schultes went to the Amazon to study arrow poisons. What he learned, the chemistry of curare and its derivatives, became essential to modern surgery. It was not what he went looking for.”

Richard Evans Schultes's original 1941 Amazon grant was to study curare, the arrow poison used by Amazonian indigenous groups. The substance had fascinated Western pharmacologists since the sixteenth century, when European explorers reported indigenous hunters using darts dipped in a dark paste that paralyzed prey. The mechanism was unknown and the compound had obvious potential medical applications.

Schultes's contribution to curare research was botanical and taxonomic: he identified the plant species that produced it (primarily Chondrodendron tomentosum), documented regional variation in preparation methods, and collected specimens that allowed systematic chemical analysis. The alkaloid tubocurarine, isolated from the specimens he collected, became the prototype for modern neuromuscular blocking agents used in surgery.

Anesthesiologists use curare derivatives in virtually every general anesthetic today. The muscle relaxation that allows surgeons to operate without the patient's reflexes interfering, and that allows intubation for mechanical ventilation, derives from a class of compounds whose botanical identification was largely the work of Schultes and his collaborators.

This is the model that Plants of the Gods argues for applying to other Amazonian plant knowledge: not the selective appropriation of individual compounds for pharmaceutical development, but the systematic documentation of the full pharmacopoeia, what plants are used, for what conditions, in what preparations, by which communities.

Curare became a surgical tool because Schultes could identify the plants and researchers could isolate the chemistry. Schultes's argument was that this should happen with the full range of psychoactive plants before the knowledge and the plants themselves disappeared, that the Amazon represented a pharmacological database that had already produced one surgical revolution and might produce others.

The aspirin pill was destroying that database faster than any political force could. And the time Schultes had was running out.

Sources

• Academy of Achievement, Schultes interview
• Wikipedia, Richard Evans Schultes
• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)