The Right Kind of Experience: Physicians, Empirics, and Poison Trials

This paper will examine sixteenth-century physicians’ attempts to portray contrived tests of poison antidotes as a learned endeavor. Poison trials had long been used by charlatans and other empirics, who hawked their nostrums in marketplace shows that involved self-poisoning and poisoning animals. From the 1520s, however, some physicians began to test antidotes using poison on condemned criminals – first at the papal court in Rome and then at other European courts. Their newfound interest in poison trials invited comparison with empirical practitioners’ marketplace shows. Physicians thus came up with deliberate narrative strategies to differentiate their trials from empirical practitioners’ “misguided” tests. One strategy involved explicit contrast between physicians’ tests and the fraudulent shows put on by “itinerant country swindlers,” in the words of German physician Eurichus Cordus (1540). More subtly, physicians penned detailed accounts of poison trials that included careful markers of their learning, such as references to the hours of the clock, pulse checks, and allusions to learned medical theory. They described these trials using scholarly terms designating experience, such as historia, observatio, or experimentum. Some of these accounts were recorded privately; others circulated at courts; and still others were shared publicly, such as Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s detailed account of a poison trial in his popular commentary on Dioscorides. The similarity between these documents, however, suggests a conscious narrative of a “right” way to conduct contrived medical trials with poison.