What Killed Venetia Digby?

Every day, Sir Kenelm Digby, courtier, scientist, and philosopher, gave his wife Venetia, Lady Digby a glass of viper wine. He made it himself. He took a few dozen live, poisonous snakes, shoved them into a cask of wine, stoppered the cask, and let it sit undisturbed for a few months, until the snakes were dead and disintegrating. He might have strained the liquid before serving it, although his friend, Alethea Howard, Countess of Arundel and Lennox, did not recommend it in her recipe:

Take eight Gallons of Sack which is the best Wine, and to that quantity put in thirty, or two and thirty Vipers; but prepare them first in this manner. Put them into bran for some four dayes, which will make them scowre the gravel and eathy [sic] part from them, then stop your Vessel or glasse you put them in very close until six months be past, in which time the flesh of the Vipers and vertue of them will be infused into the wine, although the skins will seem full, after which time you may take them out if you please, and drink of the wine when you please best to drink it.

A number of things about this story might raise questions for the modern reader. Why did Kenelm give his wife Venetia viper wine? Why did Kenelm give his wife Venetia viper wine? And why did Kenelm give his wife Venetia viper wine? These are not the same question, and they are all important. 

So why did he give her viper wine? Viper wine was not as exotic in the 17th century as it is in this one. Physicians had been prescribing and administering it regularly to patients with skin conditions since Galen. Lecturing in 1635 on the treatment of tumors, Alexander Read recommended viper wine for leprosy. In 1675, Philip Bellon went even further, claiming in The Potable Balsome of Life that drinks made with vipers were useful for treating not only leprosy but also sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis, fevers, and scurvy. A few years later, viper wine took on other powers: in Pharmaceutice rationalis, or, An Exercitation of the Operations of Medicines in Humane Bodies (1679), the distinguished physician Thomas Willis advocated viper wine for strengthening a man’s “animal spirits,” a use also endorsed by William Salmon in The Practice of Curing (1681). The poet John Donne even alluded to such medication in a sermon at St Paul’s. Given its supposed ability to restore blemished skin and “the animal spirits,” ordinary people often regarded viper wine as a combination of Botox and Viagra.

So there was nothing particularly exotic about viper wine. Why did Kenelm give it to Venetia? Perhaps she was physically worn out. She had five pregnancies in eight years. Their first child, named after his father, was born after she and Kenelm were married secretly in 1625. She went into labor after falling from a horse late in her pregnancy; to preserve the secrecy of her pregnancy and marriage, she delivered the baby at home with only her inexperienced maid to assist. Venetia and Kenelm’s second child, John, was born in 1628, the day that Kenelm set sail for a two-year voyage to the Mediterranean. After receiving the news, Kenelm wrote Venetia from his ship that she could announce their marriage and then raised anchor, leaving her with two small children but without the financial, social, and personal support of a husband. After Kenelm returned in 1630, Venetia had three pregnancies in the next three years, two of which ended tragically. Her third child, a son named after his grandfather Everard, died within hours of his birth, and she miscarried twins in the seventh month. Small wonder if after so much physical and emotional battering Venetia’s “animal spirits” were low.

Or perhaps Kenelm gave Venetia a regular glass of viper wine to restore or preserve her remarkable beauty. But there is no evidence that either of them ever valued her looks over her character. 

One thing to be said about Kenelm and Venetia is that their relationship was always intense. They met when they were teenagers. He was three years younger than she (14 to her 17), but he was spectacularly smart and charming. It probably did not hurt that he was also tall and strong and stunningly good looking. Kenelm’s mother disapproved: Venetia’s family, the Stanleys, was more distinguished than the Digbys, but they did not have much money. Considering that Kenelm’s father, Sir Everard Digby had been hanged, drawn, and quartered for conspiring to blow up King James and Parliament when Kenelm was three, it was pretty outrageous to say that Venetia Stanley’s family was not good enough.

Like many teenagers, Kenelm found ways to get around his mother’s disapproval. He wooed Venetia in person when possible and by passionate letters otherwise. She was not an easy catch by any means. As he put it later, there was no lover who “ever labored wth more passion in the gaining of [his beloved], nor mett wth greater difficulties and oppositions.” Eventually, however, Venetia fell in love with him, and when he was seventeen, he persuaded her to exchange promises that they would not marry anyone else (or be unfaithful to the other, for that matter). It was a huge commitment for Venetia. She was at that time of life in which a young woman did her best to marry a titled, affluent man — preferably also young, handsome, and of good character — and there she was, promising Kenelm that she would not marry anyone else. She must have been madly in love to make such a promise, because Kenelm was about to embark on the grand tour. 

Things went wrong immediately. Not too long after he reached France, the young, charming, handsome Kenelm Digby was propositioned by Marie de Medici, the dowager queen of France, who was old enough to be his mother. People who said no to Marie de Medici tended to get into big and often fatal trouble, so Kenelm faked his own death and ran for it. The plan succeeded. Everyone heard that Kenelm Digby had died in France — including Venetia. Biographers including E.W. Bligh and Joe Moshenska claim that it then took her nearly two years to learn that Kenelm was alive, but that is so unlikely as to be impossible. Admittedly, 17th-century long-distance communication was far worse than such communication is now, but there was still plenty of interaction between England and Europe. Kenelm was not travelling incognito once he escaped from Marie de Medici, and he interacted on the road and at every stop with people who could have delivered a letter or a message. He was in Italy for more than two years, certainly enough time to write to her. After that, it was no secret that he was in Spain with his uncle, the Earl of Bristol, negotiating the marriage of the Prince of Wales. Kenelm, now in his late teens and having a glorious time in Europe, was just not making much of an effort to communicate with her.

As for Venetia, she was no idiot: she noticed. No longer feeling bound by a promise to Kenelm, Venetia became involved with at least one nobleman (although to what degree is a bit of a mystery). The story goes that when Kenelm heard, he flung himself on the floor, howling and crying at the betrayal. Oh, to be a 17th-century Englishman, when one could expect women to be chaste while one cheated on them all over Europe.

Kenelm and Venetia’s relationship on his return was profoundly and irrevocably shaped by his silence on the grand tour. Unsurprisingly, although accounts vary of their reunion in London after three years, most agree that it was rocky. Male biographers of Kenelm have attributed both his and her standoffishness to her bad reputation, deserved or not, but that diagnosis only makes sense if Kenelm is not held responsible for his silence during those years. If he is held responsible — as he should be — her behavior is perfectly rational and reasonable. Furthermore, when she finally agreed to renew their acquaintance, Kenelm tried to treat her like a courtesan. She required him to treat her like Venetia, the intelligent, thoughtful woman from a good family whom he had wooed devotedly and honorably, and all but promised to marry. For two years, they fought this battle. Kenelm swung between respect and contempt. Once, he snuck into Venetia’s bedroom while she was sleeping, stripped, and climbed into bed with her. She managed to get him out of the bed, no small feat considering his size, strength, and undoubted resistance. One biographer maintains that Venetia berated him so soundly that he voluntarily leaped out of the bed, vowing “never again to do his love for her a disservice by being so forward and improper”. Let us be clear here. The “disservice” was not to “his love for her” but to Venetia, nor is it “forward and improper” to climb naked and uninvited into a sleeping woman’s bed to have sex with her. It is attempted rape.

Reader, she married him. But on her terms. In demanding that he acknowledge who she was and what she was due, Venetia reset the terms of their relationship and caused him to fall in love with her again. Once he began courting her in earnest, she fell in love with him again, as well. Admittedly, like many husbands of their time and class, Kenelm was not unswervingly sexually faithful. Nevertheless, their relationship was far more a partnership than his sexual infidelity would suggest. After their reunion in 1624, Venetia pawned, sold, or mortgaged her possessions to help Kenelm take up a prestigious post on a vital diplomatic mission. She supported his career and helped him win the approval of James I by encouraging his privateering voyage to the Mediterranean in 1626, even though she was pregnant with their second child. Kenelm sought Venetia’s opinion and advice on everything. As he wrote his sons:

I must confesse that her excellent temper in judging and great discretion in directing all affaires that was fit for me to consult with her (and I kept non from her that concerned my self) was the greatest guide and stay that I had in all my businesses [...] [S]he hath often turned my resolutions an other way, and hath mastered me with reason…

In a letter to his brother, he reflected: “That was the maine part of our happinesse, that we knew each others thoughtes as soon as we conceived them; we knew not how to reserve [any]thing from the others knowledge.”

Venetia died suddenly in her sleep on the first of May 1633. Kenelm was shattered. He never remarried and wore mourning until his own death in 1665. He had their entwined initials embroidered on the spines of his books. He wrote letters about her to their sons so the boys would know something of their mother as they grew up. At the time, however, his adoration manifested itself rather more idiosyncratically. After a servant discovered her dead in bed, Kenelm took plaster casts of her feet and face, and called in artist friends to paint her as she lay there and to compose a volume of poems in her honor. He also approached her death as one of science’s revolutionaries and arranged a post-mortem. He was convinced that anatomy, the most developed branch of the New Science, would find the explanation for her sudden death.

What the New Science found was that her brain had turned to sludge. The cerebral cortex is not supposed to ooze out if the top of the skull is removed, but this is precisely what Venetia Digby’s did. “When they came to open the head,” Kenelm reported, “they found the braine much putrifyed and corrupted: all the cerebellum was rotten, and retained not the forme of braine but was mere pus and corrupted matter.” 

Biographers have been rather casual about this bizarre finding; Moshenska does not speculate as to cause, and Michael Foster simply says that she suffered a “cerebral haemorrhage” overnight. From a medical perspective, there is sufficient evidence to explain not only why her brain melted but also why she drank viper wine. What killed Venetia Digby? A stroke, but not in her sleep that morning. As a research team explained in 2021, “Scientists have known for years that the brain liquefies after a stroke. If cut off from blood and oxygen for a long enough period, a portion of the brain will die, slowly morphing from a hard, rubbery substance into liquid goop.” The process is called “liquefactive necrosis” and that kind of necrotic (dead) tissue is toxic to adjoining tissue. In other words, liquefactive necrosis is internally contagious. Although the brain creates a barrier between damaged and healthy tissue after a stroke, toxins still slowly escape to kill off more and more healthy brain cells until, as researchers explain, “Liquefied brain tissue eventually will result in an empty cavity in which healthy brain tissue once existed.” Precisely what witnesses observed at Venetia Digby’s autopsy. How long does it take from the initial damage – that is, the stroke – to reach this stage? It can take months. In fact, the doctors performing Venetia’s autopsy told Kenelm that the “decay they found there was not the worke of short time,” and that “though the braine be the cause of sensation through the whole bodie, yet it hath none in it selfe”, so she would not have felt it decaying. A stroke followed by liquefactive necrosis explains why Kenelm would have been giving her viper wine every day for a protracted period of time, although the exact period of time has not been established. As the dead brain tissue poisoned Venetia’s remaining healthy neurons, she became increasingly debilitated. The viper wine was administered to revive her sinking “animal spirits.” Eventually, the liquefying necrosis killed her, leaving the cerebral sludge that poured out when her skull was opened.

So that takes care of why Venetia drank viper wine every day, and why she drank viper wine. What about the fact that it was Kenelm who took care of the medication? The answer to this question is one of the keys to the Scientific Revolution’s success at overthrowing domestic medication. Until the Scientific Revolution, food and medication were grouped under one heading because they were both made from recipes. They shared processes, equipment, materials, and the space in which they were made. Contributors to the Scientific Revolution like Sir Kenelm Digby changed the entire concept of medication, distinguishing it from food and claiming it for themselves. Where food and medication had belonged together because they shared processes, by the middle of the 18th century, food and medication belonged apart because they were different products. Kenelm and Venetia Digby’s marriage — their division of tasks, of equipment, of knowledge, of space — shows that transformation as it took place.

Reprinted from The Apothecary’s Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity by Karen Bloom Gevirtz, courtesy of University of California Press. Copyright © 2024 Karen Bloom Gevirtz.

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