There’s been some pretty bizarre news surrounding Covid-19 over the past few months, from conspiracy theories to dodgy treatment suggestions. Perhaps though we shouldn’t be so tough on lay persons touting such suggestions, as it turns out one of science’s great contributors was also guilty of scattered thinking during an outbreak when he suggested that popping a toad vomit lozenge might cure the plague. The genius-turned-hair-brained-chemist in question? Isaac Newton. While admittedly still not as dangerous as injecting bleach or putting UV light inside the body, we’re hard pushed to imagine how Newton made the leap from toad vomit to plague treatments. Perhaps he thought lightning had struck twice when he sat beneath a tree and a toad threw up on his head, but without the pivotal mathematician here to question I suppose we’ll never know. Newton’s 17th-century prescription for the plague was a veritable cocktail of anuran oddities, combining powdered toad with toad vomit to roll into a grim lozenge. The recipe was scribbled by Newton in two pages of notes on Jan Baptist van Helmont’s 1667 book De Peste, which was all about the bubonic plague. If you’re eager to give the holistic treatment a try, the pages are destined for auction this week with Bonhams. But, for legal reasons, please note that we don’t recommend making toad sick lozenges at home. You might wonder how the mathematician ended up hypothesizing pharmaceuticals in the first place, but it occurred after his studies were interrupted by the closure of Trinity College, Cambridge, during England’s bubonic plague epidemic. When it reopened again in 1667, Newton began studying the work of Van Helmont, who was a highly regarded physician and practiced during the plague epidemic of Antwerp in 1605. Newton’s notes make a relatable read during the time of Covid, having annotated his description of a case presentation in De Peste, which tells of a man who touched plague-infected papers and died two days later, with the words, “places infected with the plague are to be avoided.” I seem to remember tweeting a similar insight about gyms not that long ago. Some of Newton’s more questionable ideas, however, include the aforementioned toad lozenge. The notes read, “the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison.” Of all his seminal works, this particular brainwave never made it to publication. The notes went with an enormous archive of Newton’s work to his niece, Catherine Conduitt, following his death in 1727. The collections were then passed on and divided up between universities and private buyers until Newton’s musings on plague treatments and toads made it to the auction houses of Bonhams in the midst of a pandemic. “There was never much interest in his ‘other’ writings until recently,” said Darren Sutherland, the auction house’s books specialist, in an interview with The Guardian. “So, it really is a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man – with his remedies to ward off a virus that’s causing a pandemic.” Before you go mocking the mathematician for his musings on toad-based medicines, the pages are currently estimated to sell for around $80,000-$120,000 (£64,000-£96,000) as part of Bonhams online-only Essential Genius: Ten Important Manuscripts sale, which runs until June 10. Maybe if you hadn’t been so busy baking banana bread, you could’ve cooked up an $80k lozenge recipe, too. Source
