The Artifact: The Toad Vomit Miracle

known as Bonham's put a rare artifact up forbidding. It was an original manuscript of the English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, dating back to the seventeenth century, containing Newton's handwritten notes on a book he had read around the time he went into quarantine to avoid the Bubonic plague. The book was called The Tumulus Pestis or the Tomb of the Plague by the Flemish alchemist and physician Yan

Baptista van Helmont. In this manuscript, Newton summarizes van Helmont's for stand observations and warnings about the plague, which were based on his time working as a doctor in Antwerp when it was struck by an outbreak in sixteen o five. The Tumulus Pestis, of course, predates the germ theory of disease, so the advice it gives is of limited scientific value.

It does recommend avoiding areas crowded with infected people, which is sound though pretty obvious, but it also warns, for example, that infection could be spread if you were to touch a pestilent read with your finger. Newton records Van Helmont's

prescriptions for treatments and prophylactics against infection as well. Some come in the form of amulets made of gems like sapphire or amber, but according to Newton's notes quote, the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth and various insects in it onto a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after die. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn around the affected area,

drove away the contagion and drew out the poison. Today we know the plague is caused by a bacterium your Sinea pestis, and it can usually be treated with antibiotics. I really doubt the lozenge made out of powdered toad vomit and toad corpse would be effective at staving off infection, and I don't know what would have caused an early

modern physician like Van Helmont to believe in it. But one thing that's absolutely impossible to ignore is that the vomiting behavior of frogs and toads, known technically as and urine emesis, is a surprising, memorable, and many splendored thing. For example, if an untrained observer were to catch some species of frogs and toads at the right moment, it would look like they were giving birth to live young

by vomiting them up through the mouth. The species Rhinoderma darwinii, also known as the Darwin frog, is native to South America, found primarily in the freshwater streams of Chile and Argentina. As part of their reproductive cycle, male Darwin frogs eat their young. This is not as grim as it sounds. There's no chewing, no digestion. Instead, when a male Darwin frog swallows his tadpoles, he stores them in a pouch known as the vocal sack, where they brood safely until

metamorphosis occurs. After this, they can be vomited out of their father's mouth as fully formed froglets. Other species of nurins practice genuine gastric brooding, where a parent stores their young not just in a sack access through the mouth, but literally in the stomach where the food usually goes. But there's a fact about a urine emesis that's even more astounding, and it comes not during reproduction, but when frogs and toads need to vomit up whatever they just ate.

And urins have such a strong vomiting reflex that when their bodies detect the presence of potentially toxic contents in the stomach, they will vomit not only the contents of the digestive system, but the digestive system itself, with the stomach turning inside out, shooting out of the mouth, and hanging out from between the lips like a giant pink balloon made of ham. This adaptation is known as gastric aversion. Frogs and toads are not the only animals that do it.

Sharks and rays are sometimes known to barf up their own guts when they need to. In fact, this gastric aversion adaptation among and urins features in a strange letter I found published in the journal Nature in the year nineteen six, but authors tomy O Nito and Richard wasser

Sug called why are toads right handed? In this letter, the authors are responding to previous research published in the same journal reporting that most toads show a preference for using their right foreleg to wipe away material stuck to their head or their face. There was a question that lingered about this why the preference for right handed grooming behaviors. Nito and Wassersug suggested a possible answer rooted in gastric aversion.

You see, sometimes it's not enough to turn your own stomach inside out and dangle it out between your jaws. You have to make sure that when you swallow your stomach once again, you don't accidentally drag the noxious material you were trying to get rid of back inside along with your guts. So to prevent this, frogs and toads have an instinctive wiping reflex. While the inverted stomach is hanging out through the mouth, they will vigorously wipe off

the inside of their stomach with their forelegs. What Nito and wasser Sug pointed out was that the urine digestive system is not symmetric because the tissue connecting the digestive system to the inside of the abdomen is shorter on the right side than on the left. The stomach, when inverted, tends to hang out the right side of the mouth,

sometimes completely out of reach of the left hand. So they argue there's a chance that when a toad grooms itself with its right hand, it's because that's the hand that it can count on to reach the guts. Tune into new editions of the Artifact every Wednesday, hosted by either Robert or myself. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.

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