by Gordon Grice
The first thing people ask when they hear about my fascination with the widow is why I am not afraid. The truth is that my fascination is rooted in fear.
I have childhood memories that partly account for my fear. When I was six my mother took my sister and me to the cellar of our farmhouse and told us to watch as she killed a widow. With great ceremony she produced a long stick (I am tempted to say a ten-foot pole) and, narrating her technique in exactly the hushed voice she used for discussing religion or sex, went to work. Her flashlight beam found a point halfway up the cement wall where two marbles hung together—one crisp white, the other a glossy black. My mother ran her stick through the dirty silver web around them, and as it tore she made us listen to the crackle. The black marble rose on thin legs to fight off the intruder. As the plump abdomen wobbled across the wall, it seemed to be constantly throwing those legs out of its path. It gave the impression of speed and frantic anger, but actually a widow’s movements outside the web are slow and inefficient. My mother smashed the widow onto the stick and carried it up into the light. It was still kicking its remaining legs. She scraped it against the sidewalk, grinding it to a paste. Then she returned for the white marble: the widow’s egg sac. This, too, came to an abrasive end.
My mother’s purpose was to teach us how to recognize and deal with a dangerous creature we would probably encounter on the farm. But of course we also took the understanding that widows were actively malevolent, that they waited in dark places to ambush us, that they were worthy of ritual disposition, like an enemy whose death is not sufficient but must be followed with the murder of his children and the salting of his land and whose unclean remains must not touch our hands.
The odd thing is that so many people, some of whom presumably did not first encounter the widow in such an atmosphere of mystic reverence, hold the widow in awe. Various friends have told me that the widow always devours her mate, or that her bite is always fatal to humans—in fact, it rarely is, especially since the development of an antivenin. I have heard told for truth that goods imported from Asia are likely infested with widows and that women with bouffant hairdos have died of widow infestation. Any contradiction of such tales is received as if it were a proclamation of atheism.
Scientific researchers are not immune to the widow’s mythic aura. The most startling contribution to the widow’s mythical status I’ve ever encountered was Black Widow: Americas Most Poisonous Spider, a book by Raymond W. Thorpe and Weldon D. Woodson that appeared in 1945. This book apparently enjoyed respect in scientific circles. It was cited in scientific literature for decades after it appeared; its survey of medical cases and laboratory experiments was thorough. However, between their responsible scientific observations, the authors present the widow as a lurking menace with a taste for human flesh. “Mankind must now make a unified effort toward curtailment of the greatest arachnid menace the world has ever known,” they proclaim. The widow population is exploding, they announce with scant evidence, making it a danger of enormous urgency. Perhaps the most psychologically revealing passage is the authors’ quotation from another writer, who said the “deadliest Communists are like the black widow spider; they conceal their red underneath.”
We project our archetypal terrors onto the widow. It is black; it avoids the light; it is a voracious carnivore. Its red markings suggest blood. Its name, its sleek, rounded form invite a strangely sexual discomfort: the widow becomes an emblem for a man’s fear of extending himself into the blood and darkness of a woman, something like the vampire of Inuit legend that takes the form of a fanged vagina.
The widow’s venom is, of course, a soundly pragmatic reason for fear. People who live where the widow is common have known about its danger for centuries; from Russia to North America, folk wisdom carried warnings and remedies. However, the medical establishment was slow to accept the widow as a killer of humans. The creature seemed too small to be responsible for the things she was charged with—extravagant suffering, painful death. People bitten by the spider sometimes didn’t link it with the symptoms that developed hours later; if they did, doctors assured them the spider was not the cause.
Virtually all spiders use some sort of toxin to subdue prey; the question arachnologists were still debating into the twentieth century was whether any of these toxins, in the small doses delivered by spiders, could harm people. Many doctors treated black widow bites and believed their patients’ surmises about the source of the problem, but the larger scientific and medical community remained skeptical. The skeptics didn’t find the anecdotal evidence sufficient. They wanted definitive laboratory evidence, the kind that could be replicated. Starting in the late nineteenth century, many workers attempted to deliver such evidence in the form of animal experiments.
Reports of such animal tests—they still go on today, as scientists try to understand how the venom works— read like H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. People have applied venom to monkey kidneys and lobster claws, to the iris of the eye of a rat and to the nerves of frogs and squid. They have poisoned rats, dissected them, liquefied heart, brain, spleen, liver, kidneys, lungs, and rump muscles separately, and injected them into other rats—all of which died except for those receiving the rump-muscle fluid. They have elicited venom from widows with electric shocks. They have given widows water laced with radioactive selenium and phosphorus and then counted the Geiger clicks in the organs of guinea pigs the widows killed. They have induced widows to bite laboratory rats on the penis, after which even the rats “appeared to become dejected and depressed.” They have injected animals with the blood of human widow victims; the animals reacted as if they themselves had been bitten. In one experiment, scientists caused rats to be bitten on the ankle; then, at intervals, they amputated the bitten legs at the knee, to see how fast the venom spread. Only those who lost their legs in the first five minutes were spared the full effects of the toxin. Even those amputated in the first fifteen seconds showed some symptoms.
Such experiments revealed the peculiar reactions of different animals to the venom. Rats become more sensitive to noise, so that they’re easily startled; they rub their snouts and twitch; they put their heads on the floor between their hind legs, as if expecting an air raid, before they die. Cats, those nocturnal hunters, come to fear the light. They crawl backwards, belly to the floor, howling, and then drop into a condition that in human schizophrenics is known as waxy flexibility. The animals remain catatonically still, holding any odd position the experimenter bends them into, before they, too, die. An early experimenter noted that cats exhibiting waxy flexibility don’t react to being poked and cut. Among the animals who find widow venom especially deadly are guinea pigs, mice, horses, camels, snakes, frogs, insects, and spiders, including the widow itself. Others, like dogs, sheep, and rabbits, can often survive a bite.
The meager reactions of some animals left skeptics room for argument. The Russian government tried to resolve the question in 1899. Its experimenters couldn’t provoke the spiders into biting, so they concluded the danger was mere folklore. The project’s photographer apparently decided to illustrate this point by putting half a dozen widows on the naked chest of another man and taking pictures. During this stunt, the man being photographed got bitten. He was seriously sick within five minutes.
Meanwhile, at least half-a-dozen Western researchers tried to toxify themselves. They teased widows into biting them, or else injected themselves with fluid derived from the venom sacs of widows. All of these researchers reported no symptoms at all—a result that bolstered the position of the skeptics. Why weren’t these men affected? Research in the decades that followed showed an enormous variation in the widow’s venom according to environmental factors, especially season and temperature. The early experimenters may simply have collected spiders that were too cold or too old to produce good venom. In the cases in which the experimenter allowed himself to be bitten, rather than injecting an extract, there’s another possibility. The spider chooses whether to inject ve
nom, so she can deliver a dry bite if she wants to. Doing so is sometimes a good strategy, since the dry bite may succeed in driving off a big animal without any waste of venom. The men who injected themselves with extracts may have been misled by some faulty chemical procedure.
In 1922 an arachnologist at the University of Arkansas, William Baerg, experimented on himself. At first he couldn’t convince the widow to bite him. Eventually he did elicit a bite and was rewarded with three days of pain and delirium in the hospital. That seems like compelling evidence, but since other experimenters had gone symptomless, the skeptics held out. In the next few years the evidence mounted: a doctor compiled hundreds of case histories, and other experiments using reduced doses in the interest of safety produced slight symptoms.
The next researcher to risk the widow’s bite was Allan Blair, an M.D. and a member of the faculty at the University of Alabama’s medical school. Blair’s wife and several others volunteered to serve as his guinea pigs in a widow bite experiment, but Blair declined their offers. Taking frequent measurements and thorough notes for the scientific article he would later write, Blair provided spectacular proof of the widow’s power to harm human beings. His scientific triumph nearly killed him.
Look into the widow’s face. This close, it doesn’t even look black: it is glossed with light, supernally transformed into something luminous. A crown of black beads rims her head: she has eight eyes, though you cannot see them all as you stare into her face. The central pair looks blandly back at you. The exoskeleton is pitted and spined, nothing like the smooth, dark glass it appears to be from a distance. The forelegs seem to reach past you. Between them the hairy pedipalps dangle. Between the palps, the chelicerae: darker than the rest of the face, each shaped like the outline of a hacksaw, each terminating in a fine pale fang that looks like a cat claw and curves in toward the middle. The chelicerae seem outsized, a Rip Van Winkle beard on the relatively small face.
You could never see the widow this way without some mechanical help. The face I’m looking at is a photograph taken in 1933, an extreme close-up of “Spider #111.33,” as she was designated for research purposes. In the lower right corner of the photo is a handwritten note from the photographer to Allan Blair: “Lest you forget.”
Blair had been keeping widows in his laboratory for experiments on animals. (One of his experiments proved even the widow’s eggs are toxic to mice.) He and his colleagues and assistants had collected the spiders from the wild; widows were plentiful around Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Blair captured Spider 111.33 in a rock pile near his own home on October 25, 1933. Like the other captive widows in Blair’s laboratory, she was kept in a jar and provided with live insects. A water beetle became her last meal before the experiment. Then she went hungry for two weeks. Since earlier experimenters, like Baerg, had sometimes found it difficult to provoke a widow into biting, Blair wanted his spider hungry and irritable before he made any attempt to get bitten. (Incidentally, two weeks without food is a Cakewalk for a widow. Other scientists working with a similar setup—many numbered widows in jars on shelves—once found that they had misplaced one widow at the back of a shelf for nine months. When they found her, she was still alive and eager to eat.)
On November 12, Spider 111.33 was, in Blair’s words, “of moderate size, active and glossy black, with characteristic adult markings”—he means the red hourglass—“and appeared to be in excellent condition.” Blair described himself as “aged 32, weighing 168 pounds … athletically inclined and in excellent health.” A former college football player, Blair had just won the university’s faculty tennis championship. He had monitored his body for a week and found his condition “normal.” He had no particular sensitivity to mosquitoes or bees.
At ten forty-five in the morning, Blair used a small forceps to pick Spider 111.33 up by the abdomen and place her on his left hand. Without being prompted, she immediately bit him near the tip of his little finger, “twisting the cephalothorax from side to side as though to sink the claws of the chelicerae deeper into the flesh.” The bite felt like a needle prick and a burn at the same time. Blair let the spider bite him for ten seconds, the burning growing more intense all the while. He removed the widow, putting it back into its jar unharmed.
A drop of “whitish fluid, slightly streaked with brown” beaded at the wound—venom laced with Blair’s blood. The wound itself was so small that Blair couldn’t see it even with a magnifying glass.
Blair’s right hand was busy taking notes. Two minutes after the bite, he recorded a “bluish, pinpoint mark” where he had been bitten; the mark was surrounded by a disk of white skin. The finger was “burning.” Soon the tip of the finger turned red, except for the pale area around the bite. The pain became “throbbing, lancinating.”
Fifteen minutes after the bite, the pain had spread past the base of Blair’s little finger. The side of his hand felt a bit numb. The area around the bite was sweating. The pain quickly traveled up his hand and arm, but it still was worst at the tip of his finger, which had swollen into a purple-red sausage.
At the twenty-two-minute mark, the vanguard of the pain had spread to Blair’s chest, and the worst of it had progressed to his armpit, though the finger continued to throb. Noting the pain in the lymph node near his elbow, Blair deduced that the toxin had traveled through his lymphatic system.
Fifty minutes after the bite, Blair realized that the toxin was traveling in his blood. He felt “dull, drowsy, lethargic”; his blood pressure dropped; his pulse weakened; his breathing seemed deep. His white count began the steep climb it would continue throughout that day and night. His blood pressure and pulse continued to worsen.
Soon he felt flushed and had a headache and a pain in his upper belly. Malaise and pain in the neck muscles developed. Blair turned the note-taking duties over to his assistants. Shortly after noon, he noted that his legs felt “flushed, trembly” and his belly ached and was “tense.” A rigid, pain-racked abdomen is a classic black widow symptom, as Blair knew from his study of other doctors’ cases. He must have suspected he was about to experience pain much, much worse than he already felt. He asked to be taken to the hospital, which was three miles away. The ride took fifteen minutes, during which, as they say in politics, the situation deteriorated.
At half-past noon, Blair was at the hospital. His pulse was “weak and thready.” His belly was rigid and racked with pain. His lower back ached. His chest hurt and felt “constricted.” “Speech was difficult and jerky,” he wrote later, adding in the detached tone obligatory for the medical journal in which he published his results, “respirations were rapid and labored, with a sharp brisk expiration accompanied by an audible grunt.”
Blair’s pains made it difficult for him to lie down for electrocardiograms—in fact, an assistant dutifully wrote down that he described it as “torture”—but he managed to lie still, and the EKGs proved normal. Hearing about the painful EKGs later, newspaper reporters wrongly assumed the venom had injured Blair’s heart. That myth was repeated and embroidered in the press for decades, giving the widow’s danger a spurious explanation easier for casual readers to grasp: heart attack.
Two hours after the bite, Blair lay on his side in fetal position. The pain had reached his legs. His “respirations were labored, with a gasping inspiration and a sharp, jerky expiration accompanied by an uncontrollable, loud, groaning grunt.” He could not straighten his body, which was rigid and trembling; he certainly couldn’t stand. His skin was pale and “ashy” and slick with clammy sweat. In short, he had fallen into deep shock. The bitten finger had turned blue.
Folk remedies reported from places as diverse as Madagascar and southern Europe involved the use of heat, and some doctors had reported hot baths and hot compresses helpful. William Baerg had attested the pain-relieving power of hot baths during his stay in the hospital. Blair decided to try this treatment on himself. As soon as his body was immersed, he felt an almost miraculous reduction of his pain, though it was still severe. His breath labo
ring, his forearms and hands jerking spastically, he allowed a nurse to take his blood pressure and pulse. His systolic pressure was 75; the diastolic pressure was too faint to determine with a cuff and stethoscope. His pulse remained weak and rapid— too rapid to count.
Forty-five minutes after Blair had arrived at the hospital, his colleague J. M. Forney arrived to take care of him. Forney found Blair lying in the bathtub, gasping for breath, his face contorted into the sweat-slick, heavy-lidded mask that has since come to be recognized as a typical symptom of widow bite. Blair said he felt dizzy. Forney later commented, “I do not recall having seen more abject pain manifested in any other medical or surgical condition.”
After soaking for more than half an hour, Blair was removed from the bath, red as a boiled lobster. His breathing, like his pains, had improved as a result of the bath. Fifteen minutes later, both the ragged breathing and the pain were back at full force. Blair writhed in the hospital bed. Hot water bottles were packed against his back and belly, again reducing his pain. Perspiration poured from him, drenching his sheets. His blood pressure was 80 over 50. His pulse was a weak 120. He accepted an injection of morphine to help with the pain.
Blair continued to gulp down water. Sweat poured out of him and would for days, leaving him little moisture for producing urine. A red streak appeared on his left hand. He vomited and had diarrhea; he couldn’t eat. In the evening of the first day, his blood pressure rebounded to 154 over 92; it stayed high for a week. His face swelled; his eyes were bloodshot and watery.
The night was terrible. He felt restless and could not sleep. The pain persisted. He had chills. A dose of barbiturates didn’t help. He was in and out of hot baths all night. Sometime in that night the worst part came. Blair felt he couldn’t endure any more pain. He said he was about to go insane; he was holding on only by an effort of his steadily weakening will. His caregivers injected him with morphine again.