The astonishing tale of how rat poison miraculously saved the life of a US President

It was a stormy winter night in Wisconsin, 1933, the dark days of the Great Depression. Ed Carlson, a desperate cow farmer in dire straits, could not bare to see another of his cows bleed to death in seemingly random circumstances.

At his wits end in the middle of the night, he drove his dead cow - one of many - to a veterinary lab in order to find out why a simply, tried and tested diet of sweet clover had caused it to bleed to death.

Astonished at the fact a man had dropped a dead farm animal on the clean floor of the laboratory at such an ungodly hour, the station boss turned him away. But not before one scientist, a young german, noticed that the blood on the floor had mysteriously not clotted, despite being laid outside in the freezing temperatures for a long time. He washed his hands in the thinned-out blood and cried that something was amiss.

Normally, sweet clover is fine for cows - if dried out properly. If not, then a deadly mould would grow which would potentially harm the cows. In the middle of the Great Depression, there was no time to lose, and farmers had to take the risk. With no other signs of illness, the cows would haemorrhage to death.

The scientists got to work and it took years, all the way until June 1939 when one researcher managed to isolate the poison. The molecule he had found was dicoumarol, which prevents vitamin K from entering the blood - the key component when it comes to clots.

The investigations continued on rodents and eventually dicoumarol type 42 was isolated; it soon turned into a product that hit the shelves of America. Labelled warfarin, it instantly became the best-selling rat poison in history.

The story takes another turn: a soldier drafted for Korea in 1951 couldn’t face deployment and attempted suicide. He bought the warfarin rat poison and got to work. Each night, he took more and more expecting to die... only to wake up alive.

After six failed attempts with the mixture, he had finished the carton but suffered severe symptoms: kidney pain, stomach cramps, and unstoppable nosebleeds. Realising death wasn’t coming peacefully in his sleep, he sought help at a military hospital.

Doctors checked him out and diagnosed him with “sweet clover disease”, just like the poisoned cattle, and treated him with vitamin K. To their amazement, the effects were reversed and he recovered swiftly, despite consuming an entire carton of poison.

It turned out that rodents were especially susceptible to the dicoumarol molecule, while humans are not. Blood thinning, while deadly with the rats and cows in question, can be good for those at risk of strokes and heart attacks, who often take medicines that do such a thing.

And in September 1955, when President Dwight Eisenhower was visiting his wife’s family in Denver, he suffered one such heart attack. He was quickly moved to a military hospital nearby, where the cardiologist on hand had only one option at his disposal: give him the blood-thinning warfarin rat poison.

It worked a charm. Eisenhower recovered in no time at all, and the press went wild with stories of the miracle medicine that saved him from death’s door. Prescriptions boomed for rat poison and the rest is history. Warafin is still given out today; also known as Coumadin, it is one of the most popular anticoagulants known to science. All thanks to the farmer and his cows.

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