Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Indians Consider The Curare,
Taken Internally, As An Excellent Stomachic.
The same poison prepared
by the Piraoas and Salives, though it has some celebrity, is not so
much esteemed as that of Esmeralda.
The process of this preparation
appears to be everywhere nearly the same; but there is no proof that
the different poisons sold by the same name at the Orinoco and the
Amazon are identical, and derived from the same plants. Orfila,
therefore, in his excellent work On Poisons, has very judiciously
separated the wourali of Dutch Guiana, the curare of the Orinoco, the
ticuna of the Amazon, and all those substances which have been too
vaguely united under the name of American poisons. Possibly at some
future day, one and the same alkaline principle, similar to morphine
and strychnia, will be found in poisonous plants belonging to
different genera.
At the Orinoco the curare de raiz (of the root) is distinguished from
the curare de bejuco (of lianas, or of the bark of branches). We saw
only the latter prepared; the former is weaker, and much less
esteemed. At the river Amazon we learned to distinguish the poisons of
the Ticuna, Yagua, Peva, and Xibaro Indians, which being all obtained
from the same plant, perhaps differ only by a more or less careful
preparation. The Ticuna poison, to which La Condamine has given so
much celebrity in Europe, and which somewhat improperly begins to bear
the name of ticuna, is extracted from a liana which grows in the
island of Mormorote, on the Upper Maranon.
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