dinsdag 15 november 2005

Torpedo or cramp fish


As a side comment on the post in Curculio about Ancient Shock Therapy the following:
Bernardino Ramazzini, the 'father of industrial medicine', in his De Morbis Artificum (A.D. 1700), discusses the venomous sting of the 'torpedo' and refers a.o. to Pliny: "Torpori, & stupefactioni brachiorum, ac pedum aliquando obnoxios Piscatores esse palam est, si forte in retibus adsit inter alios Pisces Torpedo, habet enim mare animalia sua venenata non secus ac terra, quae Plinius refert, idque non solum contactu sed etiam aura venenata quae per setam, aut hastam brachio Piscatoris communicetur, uti scripsit Dioscorides, Plinius, Mathiolus atque alii, sed ab experimentis multis habitis Stephano Lorencino constat id non efficere nisi per corporalem contactum, neque in omnibus sui partibus, sed solumodo per quosdam falcatos musculos. De torpedinis stupefaciente facultate, ac remediis satis fuse egit Sennertus."
No word about any healing effects of the torpedo, but of course this is a book about diseases. Ramazzini does not mention a cure for its sting either.
(Pliny, 9.42, refers only to the torpedo's attacks on fish. The last remark in the quote was added by Ramazzini in 1713, when a certain Kaempfer had explained that the shock was electrical. I have found all this in the 1983 edition of Ramazzini in The Classics of Medicine Library, New York.)

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