The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science
An extremely well-researched monograph containing stories that bear an eerie resemblance to today’s politicised clinical trials
As if we needed another warning about this power play, the historian Alisha Rankin from the Tufts University, US, brings us her half-a-decade’s worth of research in the disturbing monograph The Poison Trials. Rankin’s account is about the rulers of the post-renaissance period, and their quest to find antidotes to killer poisons. Working with alchemists and clinicians, they were conducting primitive versions of clinical trials whose foundation principles were just beginning to be laid.