Isaac Newton, by James Thronill after Sir Godfrey Kneller (public domain)
Now that COVID is back in force and new vaccines have been approved, I thought it would be fun to re-up this post. Perhaps someday there will be a cure for COVID. But I don’t think anyone will be looking to Isaac Newton for ideas.
Holed up during the plague
Remember lockdown? Sir Isaac Newton could relate. In 1665, while the plague was wiping out a quarter of London's population, Newton was smartly holed up at his family's estate, Woolsthorpe. He accomplished much during his two years there, including writing about Belgian physician Jan Baptista Van Helmont’s treatise on the disease. He synthesized the ideas, added his own views, and suggested another cure: the ashes of a toad and its vomit.
Wow. Tough to square with the whole apple/gravity business.
$81,000 notes
The cure may not have surfaced had it not been for an auction of his plague notes at Bonham’s (fetching more than $81,000 dollars).
Prepping the toad
So, how does one prepare a toad for its last hurrah? Here’s Newton's tested method, translated from the Latin, with thanks to Bonham's:
"......against the plague...the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, onto a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area, drove away the contagion and drew out the poison."
I have so many questions.
Why the chimney business?
Why include the vomit?
Why a toad?
I can’t answer the first two, but there’s precedent for the third.
Humors or medicinal salts?
Physicians at the time were lobbing insults across the fence at one another about what to do, writes Ernest B. Gilman, professor in the Department of English at New York University, in a 2009 issue of The Lancet:
“In the absence of any verifiable cause of the disease, much less any cure, the rival camps of Galenic and Paracelcian (“Empiric” or “Chemical”) physicians were moved to rancorous debates in print, divided as they were between the traditional view that the physician’s task was to heal by correcting an imbalance in the body’s humors, and the radical new philosophy that advocated more aggressive interventions, such as the ingestion of metallic salts.”
No one knew what the hell to do. Rebalance the humors with potions, try metallic salts, or… something else?
Try the toad
Newton wasn’t the first to see the beauty in toads. Another contemporary suggestion was to hang a toad around a victim’s neck and allow it to absorb the plague’s noxious vapors from the wearer’s chest. Think of it as a kind of regifting.
In 1665, physician George Thomson gave toads a try, according to Regents Professor of History and Dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University, William Eamon:
“‘…which he himself carefully prepared ‘in as exquisite manner as possible,’ and wrapped it in a linen cloth. He then put the toad on his stomach and left it for a few hours. To his astonishment, the dried toad swelled up ‘to the bigness that it was an object of wonder.’ Thomson relates he would not have believed it if he himself had not seen it. From this Thomson deduced the healing wonder of the dried toad and used the example to argue its utility to other doctors…As Thomson explained, the dried toad ‘doth draw the pestilential poison so into its body.’ The toad attracts the plague to itself and swells up to a ‘marvelous’ size, leaving the victim free of the plague.’”
This whole method doth draw the contents of my stomach swirling ever nearer my throat.
Still other physicians suggested placing all manner of unsuspecting creatures, including—for shame!—puppies, on a sick person’s body, thinking the animal would suck the illness out. Let’s be honest, if you caught the plague, you’d try just about anything, wouldn’t you?
The verdict
Feeling as though you’d found the answer, a big fat toad hanging around your neck, the world crumbling around you, must have felt at least like hope.
I think I’ll take my chances with the plague!