The Shadows of Curare

Abstract

In the 1930s and 1940s, US pharmaceutical companies sought potential drugs in the forests and pharmacopoeia of the Amazon basin. A prominent example was the competition between E. R. Squibb and Sons and Merck to understand the chemical compounds behind curare—an umbrella term that referred to different families of plantbased Amazonian poisons—and then to turn that knowledge into a marketable drug. While the corporations and individuals associated with the curare programs in the United States framed these developments as the domestication of the wild and timeless jungle—a civilizing mission of the natural world—they relied on a web of local actors from Indigenous peoples who supplied much of the knowledge about early curare to naturalists from the region. These were networks that also stretched back in time due to the histories of exploration, resource extraction, and coerced labor that immediately preceded the period. This article examines curare’s tangled history, exploring the boundary between its visible and invisible pasts, and the differences between its public and archival records.