Zombies: A Questionable Scientific Explanation

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

For a while, back in the 1980s, people believed that science had an explanation for zombies.

 

Clairvius Narcisse, in fact, was one himself.

He had been transformed into one of the living dead through the use of the pufferfish's venom tetrodotoxin and Datura, a plant poison that causes respiratory depression, arrhythmias, hallucinations, psychosis, and even death (Guerico, Gino Del (1986) “The Secrets of Haiti's Living Dead,” Harvard Magazine (Jan/Feb) 31-37. Reprinted in Anthropology Annual Editions 1987/88 188-191).

At least, such was the claim of Harvard-educated anthropologist Wade Davis, who explained all in his 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow. Wade claimed that cultural beliefs, combined with the effects of tetrodotoxin and Datura, convinced men like Narcisse that they had died and been brought back to life by voodoo practitioners who then controlled them.

According to The Serpent and the Rainbow, “zombie powder” (tetrodotoxin) kept victims in a state of “mental” slavery, and produced “the initial death and resurrection that convinced the victims and those who knew them that they had become zombies.”

After their “deaths,” the victims were buried, exhumed, and then “enslaved as brain-damaged zombies.”

Narcisse and other zombies were then kept compliant through the administration of “regular doses of” Datura, “which produces amnesia, delirium, and suggestibility.”

Zombies were no longer merely horror story characters; they were real, and Wade had shown just how they were created.

Or so people thought, until scientists could find only little, if any, tetrodotoxin in samples of the zombie powder that Davis provided. In addition, some of Davis's colleagues took issue with his claim that zombies could be kept “in a state of pharmacologically induced trance for many years.” However, both Wade himself and other scientists defend his claims on various grounds.

For fiction writers, the truth or falsity of Wade's explanation is less relevant than it would be to anthropologists and other scientists. For example, Renfield's Syndrome is known to be a hoax meant, by its creator, as a parody of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) that is the Bible, so to speak, of the professions of psychology and psychiatry. 

Nevertheless, this supposed syndrome is still referenced as an authoritative, medically supported condition when it suits the purposes of a horror author to pretend that it is so. The same use can be put to Wade's pharmacological-cultural explanation of zombification when horror writers find that Wade's explanation advances their own narrative ends.

Nevertheless, writers should know that the anthropologist's views have been challenged and are not accepted by all of his peers. At best, his explanation seems questionable.

On the plus side, Wade's book was adapted to the screen as a pretty good horror flick.