快猫短视频

MOST people, I imagine, know about the deadly South American poison curare from detective stories, often featuring a brilliant amateur who is running rings round the dimwits of Scotland Yard, murmuring 鈥淐urare, I fancy,鈥� while surveying the corpse. Stanley Feldman鈥檚 book can give any detective story a run for its money. It is riveting.

If curare is swallowed, it does no harm, which is why people can use it to hunt and still eat their prey. If injected into the bloodstream, curare kills by paralysing its victim, and it does that by blocking the action of a chemical called acetylcholine, the messenger that carries signals from the brain to the muscles.

This discovery was the result of brilliant research, and the story has a cast of characters far more interesting than the usual suspects in a thriller. It includes the famous English eccentric Charles Waterton, an explorer who thought nothing of riding on crocodiles.

Investigating curare has led to enormous changes in medical treatments and procedures, among them modern anaesthetics, muscle relaxants and the fashionable botox treatments. This is an astonishing story. The chapter on the mongoose鈥檚 immunity to the deadly poisons of snakes is alone worth the price of Poison Arrows.