New Worlds, Year Three: More Essays on the Art of Worldbuilding by Marie Brennan

Author:Marie Brennan [Brennan, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Writing Advice, how to, Worldbuilding, Fantasy, Science Fiction, instruction
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2020-04-07T07:00:00+00:00

Poison

(1/24/20)

It might seem odd to bundle a discussion of poison in with our exploration of medicine, but as the sixteenth-century Swiss physician known as Paracelsus said, “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.”

Paracelsus was a pioneer in the use of chemistry in medicine, and the idea that physicians ought to understand the basics of that field. His ideas weren’t completely modern—he leaned heavily on the principles of hermeticism, too, developing them into his own equivalent three-humor framework—but he believed in the importance of antisepsis (rather than assuming that infection was a natural and even desirable part of the healing process), and he understood that not only could poisonous substances sometimes have benefits, but beneficial substances could also be dangerous.

Think of foxgloves. This genus of flowers contains a chemical that’s useful in treating cardiac problems—but if you want to give your patient a heart attack instead, all you have to do is feed them more than the useful dosage. Heck, even drinking too much water can kill you, by disrupting the balance of your electrolytes until your brain shuts down. On the flip side, I mentioned mercury treatments for syphilis before; they weren’t a great treatment, not least because their side effects were so terrible…but then again, having syphilis wasn’t ideal, either. The modern comparison might be chemotherapy, which amounts to attempting to poison a cancerous tumor without killing the patient around it.

But determining the proper dosage can be a tricky challenge, because a host of factors can affect how someone metabolizes a given medication, and what side effects they show. And I mentioned the placebo effect before, but we’re also starting to pay attention to its counterpart, the nocebo effect: just as someone is more likely to get better if they think they’re taking medicine, knowing about a possible side effect makes it more likely that you’ll experience it.

As you might imagine, this makes things complicated for physicians. This is probably why the laws of Tang Dynasty China made it a crime for a physician to diverge from the instructions given in medical texts when treating the emperor. Hewing to the advice therein might still fail to work, cause unpleasant side effects, or even result in the emperor’s death…but being able to say “I followed the instructions to the letter” is a form of protection. A doctor who experiments with something new might be acclaimed if it works, but if it doesn’t, he’s at high risk of being accused of having killed his patient.

Of course, sometimes that was the goal. I’m not going to attempt to give a comprehensive overview of the types of poison (here taken in the sense of “things normally used to kill someone,” not medicines you can overdose on); if you want details on that, Writer’s Digest published a book years ago called Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poison. Mithridates VI, King of Pontus, famously consumed sub-lethal doses of various toxins to build up an immunity after his father was poisoned at a banquet in 120 B.

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