Venom and vivisection in the colonial antipodes, 1788–1914

Abstract

This thesis tracks venomous animals across the colonial landscape, from European arrival to World War I. It explores how these creatures and their toxins were known in the antipodes, from Indigenous testimony and folkbiology to the nascent structures of settler science and medicine. Following a chronological structure, the six chapters focus primarily on snakes in the Australian colonies, including the isolation of their venom as an autonomous ontological agent. New Zealand spiders and animated exchanges with British India also proved pivotal, both to comprehending venomous creatures and to competing formulations of scientific medicine. My central tenet is that colonial understanding of venom was underpinned by vivisection, a practice which was frequent, widespread and prominent throughout the Victorian era. Defined as experimentation upon living animals for nominally heuristic purposes, vivisection was undertaken primarily to characterise envenomation – and hence venomous creatures. Undertaken by lay, scientific and medical practitioners, these performances commonly employed domesticated animals, especially dogs. Such practices appeared ethically and philosophically unproblematic across the colonial world, yet in 1881 the Colony of Victoria became only the second legislature worldwide to formally regulate animal experimentation. This dissertation therefore disrupts several orthodoxies of nineteenth-century vivisection: that animal experiments rarely occurred beyond Europe; that they were overwhelmingly undertaken by scientists; and that profound barriers inhibited physiological extrapolation from ‘the brute creation’ into humans. Engaging with the historiographies of science, medicine and animal studies, I argue that the co-colonisation of Australasia by familiar creatures structured a unique series of hierarchies and equivalences governing human-animal relations. In particular, I analyse venom and vivisection to elaborate the epistemological role and moral status of animal subjects within this colonial animal matrix.