̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - East India Company

How snake bites could help prevent heart attacks

amb206 — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 10:51:31 +0000

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Recent reports of a world shortage of anti-venom have drawn attention to the dangers of snake bite, especially in rural areas of developing countries where many people work in the fields, often without shoes to protect them.

Although most of the world’s 3,000 or more snake species are not venomous, several hundred species are. Among them is the Australian brown snake (Pseudonaja textilis). Judged to be the world’s second most venomous land snake (the most venomous is the black mamba), it thrives in the populous eastern side of the country. ̽��ֱ��brown snake only attacks humans as a last resort but, if untreated, its bite can prove fatal.

Snakes store venom in glands in their mouths and deliver it into their victims through hollow fangs. For many years, scientists thought that snakes made venom by modifying the proteins present in their spit but not elsewhere in their bodies. This argument made sense because snake spit contains substances that enable them to break down and digest their prey.

Recent research suggests a different picture: the vast majority of the proteins and enzymes found in venoms are very similar to substances found in other parts of snakes’ bodies – such as their livers and digestive organs. ̽��ֱ��genes that control the production of these substances in snakes become activated in the salivary glands where they produce venoms.

“Weaponising is the term we use to describe the way in which snakes like the Australian brown convert a protein utilised for their own biology into a toxin – without poisoning themselves. In some cases snakes hijack their own clotting mechanisms to make venom that, once injected, causes widespread consumption of clotting factors, microthrombosis in organs and systemic bleeding,” says Professor Jim Huntington, a principal investigator at Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR).

“By understanding more about the weaponised proteins, we can learn more about an essential attribute of blood, its ability to clot when needed – in humans as well as snakes.”

̽��ֱ��focus of Huntington’s lab is the development of a detailed understanding of the regulatory mechanisms that determine haemostatic balance – the balance between bleeding and thrombosis. It is expected that such information will inform the development of therapies for the prevention and treatment of diseases such as haemophilia, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, heart attack and stroke – all of which are devastating conditions.

Snake venom offers a route to a better understanding of the haemostatic system. In 2013, Huntington and colleagues published research that revealed the crystal structure of the prothrombinase complex from the venom of the brown snake. This complex is quite similar to human prothrombinase which converts prothrombin to thrombin, the final step in the blood coagulation cascade. An excess production of thrombin causes thrombosis, and insufficient production of thrombin results in bleeding.

̽��ֱ��crystal structure of brown snake venom enabled Huntington’s lab to gain new insights into the architecture and mechanism of the prothrombinase complex. Work is ongoing to determine how the snake’s prothrombinase relates to human prothrombinase and the intrinsic Xase complex (the proteins that activate coagulation factor X). Similar research from the Huntington lab has recently led to the creation of a new drug candidate for the treatment of thrombosis; ‘ichorcumab’ is currently in preclinical development as an antithrombotic agent that does not cause bleeding.

Only in the last 50 years have scientists begun to explore the potentially positive contribution of venoms to medicine. For many hundreds of years, snakes have been numbered among the most dangerous creatures on earth – to be avoided at all costs – and snake venom has long evoked fear and curiosity. Before the development of the first anti-venom at the Pasteur Institute in French Indochina in the 1890s, a bite from a venomous snake could mean death. Even today, the annual global death toll from snake bites is conservatively estimated at 20,000, and could be as high as 94,000.

PhD student James Hall (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) is looking at the serpentine narratives that unfolded during British involvement India from the later 18th century, initially under the rule of the East India Company and then under the Crown Raj from 1858. His research explores the ways in which moral attitudes to snakes informed attempts to describe and categorise them and shaped early attempts to assess the nature and effects of venom on human and other animal bodies.

Hall’s source materials are scientific books and papers, newspapers and periodicals, travelogues, and government archives from Britain and India, as well as the literature of the colonial world. A famous example of the latter is Rudyard Kipling’s short story Rikki-Tikki-Tavi from ̽��ֱ��Jungle Book (1894). It charmingly anthropomorphises the contest between good (in the character of the valiant mongoose Rikki) and evil (the deadly cobras Nag and Nagaina), with the drama taking place in the home of a middle-class British family living in India. Rikki’s bravery saves the innocent boy Teddy from a fatal snake bite.

“Snakes loomed large in the imperial imagination. Kipling’s story is typical of how snakes were typecast as villains in Victorian fiction. ̽��ֱ��cobras embody recurrent fears about the invasion of the supposedly hostile Indian environment into domestic spaces,” says Hall. “Snakes in India actually harmed very few Europeans, but when new statistical data revealed something of the extent of indigenous deaths due to snake bite, the problem became a challenge for a benevolent science as part of the rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’.”

Humans and other primates are believed to have evolved an instinctive revulsion for snakes. This innate fear is reinforced by key narratives in the Bible, which remained a key authority on animals in the 19th century. In the creation story, the serpent wreaks havoc in the Garden of Eden by craftily tempting Eve to eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Among the hundreds of pictorial representations of this story is German artist Johann König’s painting, Adam and Eve in Paradise (circa 1629), in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

“König’s snake shows some similarity to a European viper or adder. In such scenes the serpent is often seen coiled around the tree, watching on. Earlier depictions sometimes show the serpent in a more humanoid form, with a head, torso and upper limbs.

" ̽��ֱ��original physical form of the serpent in the Garden was a source of debate given that it was only afterwards cursed by God to crawl on its belly,” says Hall.

“ ̽��ֱ��poor biblical reputation of snakes contributed to their unpopularity as objects of scientific study. But there were also practical obstacles to snake science relating to the collection, transportation, and preservation of snakes. Research into the effects of venom involved carrying out technically difficult and controversial experiments.”

From the 1820s, living snakes were collected to exhibit in newly-opened zoos in Britain. They had earlier appeared in travelling menageries. Snake specimens in alcohol, snakeskins and prepared skeletons had been mainstays of natural history collections from much earlier, but the number of species increased dramatically with imperial expansion in the 19th century.

At the Zoological Society’s gardens in Regent’s Park in London, visitors had the opportunity to see venomous snakes face-to-face at the new reptile house, which opened in 1849. Thousands flocked to see the snakes, including men of science such as Charles Darwin, who took the opportunity to carry out research into animal emotions.

̽��ֱ��reptile house was conceived and marketed as an educational resource, but many people visited it for the thrill of seeing (and provoking) dangerous snakes up close, and ended up confirming their own preconceived ideas. Tragedy struck in 1852 when a keeper of reptiles, Edward Gurling, was bitten on the nose by a cobra and killed. ̽��ֱ��Zoological Society moved quickly to reassure the public of the safety of the establishment, and the keeper was described as being drunk from a night of gin drinking and acting with “rashness and indiscretion”.

“ ̽��ֱ��death of Gurling was an important moment for scientific research into venomous snakes,” says Hall. “It led to an upsurge in interest in venomous snakes and renewed efforts to find an antidote to their venom in the colonies. Correspondents wrote to ̽��ֱ��Times offering up their own treatments for snake bite guaranteed by time spent in Africa and on the subcontinent. But it would be another four decades before the first anti-venom was developed.”

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: W is for an animal that made the journey from a beach in Sussex, to pride of place in the Museum of Zoology.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Aboriginal painting of the prothrombinase complex (Tom Murray-Rust); Adam and Eve in Paradise by Johann König (Fitzwilliam Museum); Detail from Adam and Eve in Paradise by Johann König (Fitzwilliam Museum); Illustration of the Zoological Society’s reptile house (Illustrated London News, 2 June 1849).

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, V is for Venomous Snake: an animal that has long evoked fear and curiosity, but is revealing important clues for the development of treatments for some devastating conditions.

Weaponising is the term used describe the way in which snakes convert a substance into venom – without poisoning themselves

Jim Huntington

Museum of Zoology, Cambridge

Skull of Bitus arietans – or Puff Adder – from the family Viperidae

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie and the sad sailor

lw355 — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 13:02:36 +0000

A woman peeks from the curtain of a wagon, rich men parade on a bejewelled elephant and a pensive scholar clutches the tools of his trade: these paintings, no bigger than playing cards, adorn transparent sheets of mica and were bought in India as souvenirs by sailor Charles Augustus Whitehouse in 1842.

They were painted in India for the colonial tourist trade and are so rare and fragile that Dr Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies, admits “I get the shakes when I handle these.”

“They represent an important period in Indian art – the Company School of painting – when Indian art developed perspective,” he adds. Some depict courtly scenes, while others appear to be sets of costumed characters or Indian pastimes and trades.

̽��ֱ��collection has 69 mica paintings. Their vibrant images are remarkably intact despite the fragility of mica – a transparent mineral – which may have been used by the painters in order to imitate the European trend for painting on glass. There are also six paintings on pipal leaves.

Today, they are held in the archives of the Centre for South Asian Studies, which houses a unique collection of letters, diaries, photographs and films belonging to ordinary British people who documented their lives in India and South Asia.

“What I especially like about the mica paintings is they accompany a pair of diaries written by a sailor who bought them when he stopped in India on his was from Liverpool to India on the Brig Medina.”

Unlike many diaries that have become a source of historical information, Whitehouse’s are a deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic account – so much so that they were often written as if there was no-one else on board.

Entitled ̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie, the diaries are inscribed to his mother, and come with a caveat scrawled across the front “Here it comes something hot from the oven. Mind your eye or it may burn your fingers.”

Alongside his self-portrait, seascapes, a map of his route and a smattering of voyage details – “Potato cakes for tea” – Whitehouse begins to dwell on his lost sweetheart back home, stolen away, he says, by another man: “Hanging, drawing and quartering would be really too good for such an intruder.”

As the Brig continues to be becalmed, the pages fill with plaintive poetry “Love in a woman neer sinketh deep, Into the bosom she lets him creep… Love in a man is a far different thing, Forms more than roses it doth then bring.”

Eventually, many pages later, the sad sailor rallies, bringing his melancholic meanderings to an end with: “So I’ve blued and blued and bored and bored you until I work myself back into my usual good humour. Apres les pluit, les bonne temps. ̽��ֱ��storm is over and I feel much refreshed… after moping for a good half an hour I went below for a cigar.”

̽��ֱ��Centre of South Asian Studies archive comprises a unique collection of photos, papers, films and oral histories covering many aspects of life in South Asia.

www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/archive/archome.html

Inset images: paintings on mica (Centre of South Asian Studies Archive); Charles Augustus Whitehouse's self-portrait (Centre of South Asian Studies Archive).

̽��ֱ��idiosyncratic diaries of one man’s voyage from Liverpool to India, and the exquisite painted souvenirs he bought there, are among the treasures to be found in the archives at the Centre of South Asian Studies.

Here it comes something hot from the oven. Mind your eye or it may burn your fingers

Charles Augustus Whitehouse

̽��ֱ��sad sailor and ̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie

Centre of South Asian Studies Archive

Charles Augustus Whitehouse's diary and souvenirs

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Hidden narratives of torture

amb206 — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 13:18:06 +0000

In April 2011 the British government released to the public the first set of documents from its hidden archive of decolonisation, a lengthy process that saw most of Britain’s extensive colonies gradually gain their independence. ̽��ֱ��Foreign and Commonwealth Office had claimed that the archive did not exist, and later that the documents had been simply ‘lost’ or ‘misplaced’. It is highly likely, however, that these records were deliberately hidden away in Hanslope Park, a high security government communications facility in Buckinghamshire, in order to protect government and its agents from litigation and embarrassment.

This massive archive charts the end of British colonialism and details the brutality that often accompanied the closing chapters of the British Empire when colonies’ independence movements were quashed by force. ̽��ֱ��most notorious clashes took place when the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was violently suppressed by the colonial government during the 1950s. ̽��ֱ��massacres and abuses that took place led to a group of Kenyans last year claiming the right to sue the British government for the systematic torture they had experienced. It was these claims that resulted in the ‘discovery’ of the lost archive.

Beneath London’s streets in the basement stacks of the British Library’s India Office Collection lies another story of brutality and torture in colonial times. ̽��ֱ��substantial archive of the East India Company spans a period of over two and a half centuries, from the Company’s foundation by Royal Charter by Elizabeth I in 1600 to its dissolution by Parliament in 1858. Its records – which cross three oceans and four continents, and contain documents pertaining to maritime commerce, wars of conquest and all branches of governance - have never been concealed. But many of the narratives contained in the archive have remained largely undisturbed. Among them are the Madras torture allegations of the mid-19th century.

Though little known today, officials of the East India Company were subject to a scandal that hit the headlines, and shocked Britain and India alike. In the summer of 1854 Parliament ordered the East India Company conduct an investigation into allegations that torture was being used to extract tax payments from subjects in the Madras Presidency of India, one of the three main administrative bodies of Company-controlled India subservient to the Governor-General in the capital, Calcutta. At this time, the East India Company was at the height of its territorial and administrative powers in India, having recently annexed vast sections of central India and renewed its charter with the British government, continuing Company rule indefinitely. In the House of Commons, Company chairman Sir James W Hogg vehemently denied the allegations, claiming that they were completely ‘unsupported by proof’.

̽��ֱ��charges of torture were brought to the attention of Parliament as a result of petitions from the Madras Native Association. This organisation had been established by a leading Madras political activist and merchant named Gazulu Lakshminarasu Chetty to advocate for government reform and speak out about injustices during the run-up to the Company’s 1853 Charter renewal. ̽��ֱ��allegations of torture, publicly made in the House of Commons, stirred debate in the English and Indian press, both of which condemned the ‘despotic rule’ of the Company.

In the spring of 1855, the investigation was published and released to the public in what has become known as the Madras Torture Report. ̽��ֱ��report found that the use of torture was widespread in India and encompassed not only revenue matters but also police activities, and had been occurring for decades under Company rule. Initially dismissive of allegations of abuse, the directors of the Company could no longer deny the overwhelming evidence that torture was taking place. ̽��ֱ��Company undertook to put measures into place that would put a stop to practices of using physical force. However, the outbreak of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and the subsequent dissolution of the East India Company, quickly overshadowed the Torture Report’s findings, which have largely been forgotten.

“I first came across the investigation into torture in the work of other scholars who made passing reference to it and I began to look closely at the records of the East India Company’s Torture Report,” explained Elliott. “In the short three months in 1855 that the three Company-appointed investigators operated from an office in the Madras Polytechnic College, they received a total of 1,959 individual testimonies from Indians complaining of torture being inflicted upon them. Some even travelled 400 miles to prefer their charges against the Company in person. ̽��ֱ��victims complained of a wide range of abuses suffered, from beatings, being tied up and left in the tropical sun, to being suspended from trees, pinched, placed in a sack of chillies, sodomy - the list went on and on.”

Two incidents (far from the worst) serve as a glimpse into the contents of the report. In early 1854, one Annish Pillay was severely abused by the police. His brother Subapathy told the investigators that ‘they tied his legs, hung him up with his head downwards, put powdered chilly in his nostrils’ in order to elicit a confession from him for a crime that he did not commit. In another case, a woman identified only as Baulambal told how she was first tied up and ‘slapped…on the head’. Her account continues, ‘[a] rope suspended to a beam was then passed behind the rope which tied my arms, and I was hung up about a foot from the ground.’ She was abused in other ways until she passed out; she was then raped. Stories like these fill the over 300 pages of the Torture Report, and can be found scattered throughout the Company archive.

As a researcher into systems of governance, Elliott is interested in the ways in which a regime that was outwardly liberal espoused torture. By the 1850s the East India Company had ruled most of India, either directly or indirectly for almost a century and had outgrown its 17^th-century maritime and trading origins to become a government in its own right, ruling over foreign peoples many times more numerous than the population of Britain. ̽��ֱ��Company came to view itself as an enlightened alternative to the ‘oriental despotism’ of its Mughal predecessors and India had even served as the laboratory for the utilitarian ideals of governance proposed by the social reformer Jeremy Bentham.

To the British and to the Company, torture was, as the President of Madras, George (3^rd Lord) Harris wrote in September 1854, a ‘matter so deeply affecting the honour of the British nation, and so utterly repugnant to its principles of government’, yet it was carried out by agents of the state for years. Elliott said: “In this manner, the 1855 Madras torture revelations were similar to the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal. This incident exposed US agents acting in ways that were damaging to the image of nation, one that prides itself on liberal democratic values.”

What interests Elliott is how self-professed ‘good’ states make use of ‘bad’ practices to serve their own ends and, moreover, what specific mechanisms are used to employ, justify, rationalise and evade detection. “ ̽��ֱ��current, almost daily exposure of the use of torture committed by the Assad government in Syria or in Libya under Gaddafi surprises almost no-one; crimes against humanity under such regimes are almost expected to occur,” he said. “Liberal democracies, like Canada and Britain, are also being charged by human rights groups of being complicit in torture by deporting individuals to countries with poor human rights records. ̽��ֱ��US has gone furthest by legalising enhanced interrogation techniques supposedly to serve the greater good of protecting liberal democratic values and way of life.”

In 19th-century India, torture was employed to serve the fiscal demands of the state. Committed by low-level Indian agents of the state to serve those ends, tortuous acts were excused by Company officials as ‘native barbarity’ that would naturally diminish as the liberal imperial project brought the fruits of civilisation, modernity and morality to India - another form of the greater good. Elliott cautioned: “Comparisons between Company India and current states should not be too closely made, but parallels certainly exist concerning the use of violence and torture among liberal imperial and liberal democratic systems.”

̽��ֱ��reason the issue of torture under the East India Company has not yet been fully examined is partly due to the fact that evidence for it is scattered throughout the archival record. Mentions of torture are found across committees and departments, within the Company’s six kilometre-long records. Moreover, the issue needs to be examined in conjunction with other contemporary sources such as archived private papers, family collections and missionary reports and records, newspapers and parliamentary proceedings. A close reading of all these sources is required to grasp the extent to which torture prevailed in India. ̽��ֱ��Parliamentary Archives, housed in the Victoria Tower of the Palace of Westminster also provide useful, yet under-researched, insights into the way in which the torture allegations were debated and considered by its members at the time, and into the relationship between Whitehall and India under the Company.

“Given the substantial amount of research into torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ taking place in today’s world, surprisingly little scholarly research has been undertaken to provide any kind of useful comparisons or arguments for continuity or disjuncture in how states and governments have developed in their relation to corporeal torture. I hope that my research will make a contribution to this understanding,” said Elliott.

Derek Elliott is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, and affiliate of the Centre for South Asian Studies, at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Allegations of torture by government officials are emerging daily from countries caught up in the struggle for democracy. Derek Elliott, a researcher in Cambridge's Faculty of History, is looking at governmental torture and violence in colonial India and has uncovered surprising links with modern states.

̽��ֱ��1855 Madras torture revelations were similar to the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal. This incident exposed US agents acting in ways that were damaging to the image of nation.

Derek Elliott

Parliamentary Archives Ref: HL/PO/JO/10/9/259 file 918, 26 July 1854

Letter from directors of the East India Company ordering an inquiry into the allegations of torture raised in a recent parliamentary debate.

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