In the fall of 1938, a frail young American explorer set off down a river in the western Amazon in search of a poison he thought might save his life. Richard Gill had learned that local tribes used blow darts laced with a botanical mixture called curare to hunt their prey—and that it might be a cure for many ailments, including his own mysterious disease. He also thought he could make a fortune by bringing it to Western pharmaceutical companies. Determined to learn and deploy the secrets of curare, he foraged for samples, studied their scientific makeup, and made deals with Indigenous poison masters, even as his rival, the entrepreneur-botanist Boris Krukoff, sought to do the same.
In The Flying Death, the historian Matt O’Hara brings to life Gill’s epic quest, a stranger-than-fiction story that moves from Indigenous lands in the Amazon to rogue medical trials to cutthroat strategizing in corporate boardrooms. Curare had a major impact on the practice of medicine as it became routinely used in shock therapy to treat psychiatric disorders, transformed anesthesia and surgery across the globe, and led to a Swiss scientist’s Nobel prize.
Navigating treacherous terrain and politics, Gill and Krukoff sparked a veritable curare-industrial complex, while the Amazonian peoples they relied on received little or no recognition or benefit. The Flying Death tells a dramatic and indicting story of exploration and the exploitation of Indigenous knowledge. It also poses searching questions about who receives the glory and profit when medical progress is made, and who pays the price.
"The Flying Death is a thrilling celebration of science and adventure that is clear-eyed about the exploitation at the heart of exploration. Through it all, O'Hara's storytelling coils around you like an Amazonian vine, as intoxicating as the miracle plants his characters pursue."
"Compulsively readable, well structured, historically informative and entertainingly written. The Flying Death tells the story of how a modern-day miracle drug was born out of an Amazonian blowgun poison thanks to the efforts of a motley crew of fortune-seeking adventurers - a crew that included a handful of unscrupulous medical researchers, an obsessive White Russian emigre, and an American storyteller with big dreams.”
JULIAN SANCTON, New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth and
Neptune's Fortune
JON LEE ANDERSON, New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
"Matt O’Hara has uncovered the thrilling true story of Richard Gill, a sickly American explorer
who ventured into the Amazon in 1938 in search of a miracle drug – and ended up transforming
medicine as a whole. Moving from jungle rivers and poison-masters to medical trials and
corporate boardrooms, O’Hara reveals how curare, once an indigenous poison, transformed modern surgery, shock therapy, and global medicine – while raising urgent questions about
discovery, profit, and the people erased from the story of progress. Gripping, exciting, and
deeply researched, The Flying Death is an adventure story about ambition, exploitation, and the
true cost of medical breakthroughs."
