A duel between a spider and a toad: venom and collaboration at the Royal Society

mid-tenth-century depiction of a toad from a MS of Dioscorides’ De materia medica (New York, NY, Morgan Library, MS M.652, fol. 318v.
Writing in the 1650s, a member of the Hartlib Circle (likely Benjamin Worsley) affirmed that anyone who wished to “lay any sure grounds for the Reformation or Instauration of the Art of medicine must in some measure know what is the Roote of death in every man.” For Worsley, a crucial way of doing this was the study of “the roote grounde or heade of all venom and poyson.”[1] From its earliest years, the Royal Society’s fellows and associates shared Hartlib’s concern with the study of poison and, in particular, venom. Natural histories, queries, and experiments relating to venom (particularly the venom of vipers) abound in the minutes of the Society’s meetings compiled and published by Thomas Birch.[2] This is in one sense unsurprising: a medical fascination with venom and possible antidotes dates back to antiquity and developed in the mediaeval period.[3] However, examining the specifics of how the Royal Society approached their studies of venom, and how they chose to collaborate during such studies, provides some fresh insight into an important question: how did the requirement to find effective solutions to pressing issues affect the sort of reporting the Royal Society was willing to trust and the degree of collaboration it was willing to undertake?
Consultation of Henry Oldenburg’ correspondence and the Society’s published journal, the Philosophical Transactions, show that natural histories of venom’s operation and reports of (fatal or non fatal) poisonings were a favoured contribution of the Royal Society’s correspondents and fellows. A particularly memorable example is contained in a letter from the Oxford-educated cleric Israel Tonge to Henry Oldenburg, dated 6 June 1670. In it, Tonge relates that he had heard of fights between field spiders and toads occurring in Kent.[4] (Tonge had previously advertised his ability to provide proof of these fights to Oldenburg, and the naturalist and Royal Society fellow Francis Willughby had expressed his desire to see such information.[5]) For Tonge, these fights were potentially useful in searching for cures to poisons because toads had long been viewed as possessing anti-venomous properties (by, for example, Jan Baptist van Helmont). Tonge therefore relates that he made the journey to the towns of Marven and Mavell to investigate the veracity of these fights. Tonge collects and reports the testimony of various individuals from different social backgrounds—two members of an alehouse-owning family who affirmed that a duel had taken place years ago and delivered first- and second-hand testimony of its details, alongside a “captain Butcher” who corroborates the alehouse family’s account with his own second-hand report gathered from a friend. The fact that all of these reports contained identical accounts of how the spider envenomated the toad and the toad eventually died led Tonge to conclude that Van Helmont’s prescription of wearing the toad as an amulet to cure poisonings was ineffective; the toad itself was not inherently resistant to venom. In its place, Tonge draws upon Erasmus’ account of a similar duel between a spider and a toad to recommend the rubbing of a ribwort on a wound to cure venom. He does, however, also suggest that we should consider the efficacy of an amended Helmontian cure: instead of using the powdered body of a toad as an antidote to venom, we might try a toad’s “voided earth and water”.[6]
How did the Royal Society react to Tonge’s paper? Willughby clearly found Tonge’s combination of Helmont, Erasmus, and first-hand investigation somewhat unconventional, writing that he had not fully understood Tonge “ingenious riddles” concerning the nature of the duels. Nevertheless, he treated the possibility of their occurrence and (Tonge’s proposed antidote) with scientific seriousness; he speculated on why spiders might seem smaller after they had fought (because of a loss of blood, not a loss of venom) and endorsed Tonge’s opinion that toads voided insects after their death.[7] As mentioned above, the Royal Society was a repository for numerous natural histories and medical reports on venom. These included, but were not limited to, a report by Martin Lister on two boys bitten by a mad dog; a report on the death of an English merchant by snake bite near Aleppo, including local advice on how he could have survived; and a report by Théodore de Mayerne detailing his discussion about antidotes to venom with the travelling “mountebank” Johannes Pontaeus.[8] When it came to determining the potential efficacy of possible antidotes—and, therefore, the ability to save life and prevent death— the elite, carefully structured testimony that Steven Shapin placed at the heart of the Royal Society’s experimental culture was not so important.[9] One had to take seriously all forms of testimony (learned and unlearned, patient or physician) that could provide accurate insight into how effective treatments could be developed and ineffective ones debunked. As Tonge shows us, once this was achieved, it was permissible to theoretically speculate about why certain antidotes worked or did not work, but such medical speculation was more persuasive if it was based on an initial study of whether they worked that traversed geographical and social boundaries to collect the maximum amount of experience possible.
To be sure, this type of collaborative natural history was not always conducive to coming up with definitive results: as Martha Baldwin has shown, the longstanding popularity of snakestones (stones reported to adhere to a venomous wound and suck the poison out), and the intractability of their advocates in seventeenth-century Italy, both frustrated doubters who prized controlled trials (like Francesco Redi) and demonstrates the epistemic value those interested in venom gave to natural histories and field reports that, like Tonge’s, traversed social and educational hierarchies.[10] The volume of and disagreements over these reports meant that the efficacy of snakestones remained an open and disputed question throughout the century which naysayers, despite their best experiments, could not definitely resolve. Examining the nature of the collaboration the Royal Society invited in its work on venom thus provides a further opportunity to demarcate between seventeenth-century experimental and natural historical epistemologies, and develop our understanding of how questions of public benefit and the search for efficacy endorsed and enacted collaborative ideals in ways that a more specialised and elite experimental culture did not always do.
NIALL DILUCIA
[1] Copy Letter in Scribal Hand A [Worsley?] to [Boyle?] (Undated [Late 1658-Early 1659]), in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Michael Hannon, The Hartlib Papers. Published by The Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, 2013 [available at: http://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib, accessed 30/10/2024].
[2] See Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1756 [4th edn.]), vol. 1, e.g. 478; vol. 2, 403–404; vol. 3, 427–428.
[3] For studies of venom from antiquity see e.g. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, book xxix; for studies on venom in the mediaeval period see Kathleen Walker-Meikle, “Animal Venoms in the Middle Ages,” in Philip Wexler (ed.), Toxicology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Amsterdam, 2017), 151–158.
[4] See Israel Tonge to Henry Oldenburg (6 June 1670), in A. Rupert Hall & M. Boas Hall (eds.), The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (Madison [vol. I–VI]/London [vol. X–XIII], 1965–1986) [hereafter CHO], VII, 23–38.
[5] Israel Tonge to Henry Oldenburg (15 March 1669/1670) and Francis Willughby to Henry Oldenburg (16 April 1670), in CHO, VI, resp. 564 and 635.
[6] Tonge to Oldenburg (6 June 1670), CHO, VII, 27–28.
[7] Willughby to Oldenburg (7 June 1670) and Willughby to Oldenburg (19 August 1670), CHO, VII, resp. 30 and 138.
[8] For Lister’s report see Phil. Trans. 1698 (242), 246-248; for the report on the death of the English merchant from a snake bite near Aleppo, see Phil. Trans. 1698 (245), 351–352; for Théodore de Mayerne’s report see Phil. Trans. 1694 (211), 162–166.
[9] See e.g. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: 1995).
[10] See Martha Baldwin, “The Snakestone Experiments: An Early Modern Experimental Debate” Isis 86: 3 (1995), 394–418.
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Niall Dilucia (December 9, 2024). A duel between a spider and a toad: venom and collaboration at the Royal Society. NOTCOM. Retrieved July 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12vjq