In 1861, on Livingstone's Zambesi expedition, a botanist named John Kirk noticed his chronic heart trouble had suddenly vanished.
He traced it to his toothbrush. It had been sitting in his pocket next to seeds he'd collected; seeds Zambesi hunters used to tip arrows that could drop an animal in minutes.
Somali, Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Ethiopian hunters had refined this poison for over two thousand years. Boil the strophanthus seed, concentrate the extract, coat the arrow tip.
Kirk's accidental exposure led to the birth of ouabain in 1888.
It turned out to be one of the most precise cardiac drugs ever discovered; it slows and strengthens the heartbeat with a specificity European medicine hadn't achieved with anything else at the time.
Between 1910 and 1935 alone, doctors in Germany logged tens of thousands of injections of it for heart failure.
The same molecule African hunters used to make an animal's heart stop, in the right dose, made a failing human heart start working properly again.
They didn't discover cardiac pharmacology.
They'd already mastered the dose-response curve of the heart with nothing but a boiling pot and an arrow tip.
Ele entrou totalmente no personagem Homelander. Tenho certeza que ele só escolheu uma esposa Argentina porque de alguma forma imagina que está comendo o Messi