An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to 2022 by Fielding H. Garrison (1870-1935), Leslie T. Morton (1907-2004), and Jeremy M. Norman (1945- ) Traditionally Known as “Garrison-Morton”

15961 entries, 13944 authors and 1935 subjects. Updated: March 22, 2024

DAVIS, Wade

2 entries
  • 9313

Preparation of the Haitian zombi poison.

Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, 29, No. 2, 139-149., 1983.

According to popular accounts, zombies are innocent victims, raised in a comatose trance from their graves by malevolent Voodoo priests (bokors), and forced to toil indefinitely as slaves. Davis traced the material basis for zombification to a poison that lowers metabolism and simulates death to such an extent that the victim is buried alive, and later resuscitated with an antidote administrated in the graveyard by the bokor. Though the recipes for the poison vary in different parts of Haiti, the key ingredient Wade discovered to be tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin derived from fish of the order of tetraodontiformes, usually from one of two genera of the puffer fish. Digital facsimile from JSTOR at this link.



Subjects: ANTHROPOLOGY › Medical Anthropology, BIOLOGY › Ethnobiology, COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › Haiti
  • 8791

Passage of darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie.

Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.


Subjects: ANTHROPOLOGY › Medical Anthropology, BIOLOGY › Ethnobiology, COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › Caribbean, COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › Haiti, Magic & Superstition in Medicine, TOXICOLOGY