The curious story of a renowned Field Museum scientist, a deadly snakebite, and a diary that documented it all
A world-renowned museum curator gets bitten by a snake he's trying to identify. He does not seek medical treatment. He goes home and documents his symptoms hour by hour in a journal, including all the explicit details.
Within 24 hours, he has died.
What does this sound like? The plot of a comic book? A Netflix serial?
Well, it really happened. The curator's name was Karl Patterson Schmidt, and he worked at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. He died of that snakebite on Sept. 26, 1957 — 68 years ago Friday.
While Schmidt may be best known for that lurid tale, his achievements and legacy in the field of herpetology — the study of reptiles and amphibians — are honored by zoologists at the Field Museum and beyond to this day.
The expert and the snake
Schmidt was born in Lake Forest, Illinois on June 19, 1890. He began his studies at Lake Forest College in 1907, but was pulled away to help establish a family farm in Wisconsin.
After spending six years on the farm and taking correspondence courses, Schmidt was admitted to Cornell University. He majored in geology, but developed an interest in herpetology and put together a collection of reptiles and amphibians while on a geological expedition to Santo Domingo in what is now the Dominican Republic.
Upon graduating in 1916, Schmidt was hired by renowned herpetologist Mary Cynthia Dickerson to be her assistant at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He was later promoted to assistant curator.
Schmidt arrived at the Field Museum in August 1922, 15 months after the museum opened to the public in its current home south of Grant Park. He became the first head of the museum's new Division of Amphibians and Reptiles, and the museum flourished as a center of herpetology research under his watch.
According to the Field Museum, its herpetology collection had fewer than 8,000 specimens when Schmidt arrived, and 50,000 specimens by the time he was promoted to chief curator of zoology in 1941, making it one of the world's largest collections.
Schmidt made research expeditions around Central and South America, the West Indies, islands of the Pacific and other locations during his time at the Field Museum, naming at least 12 genera and more than 200 subspecies of amphibians and reptiles.
On Wednesday, Sept. 25, 1957, Schmidt, by then 67, was two years into retirement as chief curator of zoology but still worked as curator emeritus. That day, the Lincoln Park Zoo was stumped by a snake that had come into its possession, and brought it to the Field Museum for Schmidt's expertise.
Dr. Sara Ruane, associate curator of herpetology and director of Core Laboratories at the Field Museum's Negaunee Integrative Research Center, said it was not uncommon for zoos to receive mystery shipments of animals back in those days.
"It would not be unusual for a reptile importer, including potentially a zoo that was looking to add reptiles or other animals to their exhibits, you might have a circumstance where somebody said, 'We want to get some animals from Africa,' and so the importer-exporter is going to just box up a shipment of assorted species, and you might not know what's going to be in there," Ruane said.
Schmidt wrote in his diary that a Mr. Truett from the Lincoln Park Zoo had arrived at the Field Museum with a 30-inch snake. Online records show a Bob Truett worked at the zoo as a zoologist at the time, but Schmidt does not mention Truett's first name.
Schmidt wrote that the zoo knew the snake they had brought him was an African snake, and it looked like a boomslang with its "characteristic head-shape, oblique and keeled dorsal scales, and bright color pattern."
But a boomslang usually has a divided anal plate — the large scale that covers its cloacal opening — and this snake did not.
"That it was nevertheless a boomslang (Dispholidus typus) was dramatically attested by its behavior," Schmidt wrote.
Schmidt said he was talking with Truett, Field Museum curator of amphibians and reptiles Dr. Robert F. Inger, and reptiles and amphibians division assistant Hymen Marx about the possibility that the snake was indeed a boomslang when the snake bit him.
"I took it from Dr. Inger without thinking of any precaution, and it promptly bit me on the fleshy lateral aspect of the first joint of the left thumb," Schmidt wrote.
Schmidt wrote that the snake had bitten him with its rear fangs, with only the right fang entering to its full length of about 3 mm.
"The punctures bled freely and I sucked them vigorously," he wrote.
A grim and graphic diary of symptoms
Later that day, Schmidt got on a commuter train and went home to south suburban Homewood, where he lived with his wife Margaret. He likely did not think being bitten by a boomslang was something serious to worry about, Ruane explained.
There are two families of snakes typically considered medically important due to their venom. The first is vipers, which have large, foldable fangs and include rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths or water moccasins, "true vipers" such as bush vipers and desert horned vipers, and adders.
The second is elapids, which have fixed fangs at the front of their mouths, and include cobras, mambas, coral snakes, and a vast variety of snakes found in Australia.
Boomslangs are not vipers or elapids; they are colubrids, a diverse group of snakes that are mostly considered harmless. Boomslangs themselves are not harmless and do have venom, but it's not as easy for them to inject their venom as it is for a cobra or a rattlesnake.
"These snakes do not have a sophisticated venom delivery system the way elapids or vipers do," Ruane said. "Instead, they just have these larger teeth in the back of their mouth. They do not have a ducting system that involves a duct that goes from the venom gland down into the tooth, like a syringe. Instead, they just have a grooved tooth, and they just kind of have to chew the saliva that has these venom toxins into what they're eating."
Ruane said it was likely experts examining boomslangs in 1957 wouldn't have taken the same precautions as they would with a cobra or water moccasin. Schmidt also might not have believed the boomslang that bit him was as dangerous as it turned out to be.
"If you were living in sub-Saharan Africa, in countries where this snake occurs, you might have a very different knowledge base," she said. "It's not like now where you get on the internet and you can find out all this information just like that. All there are is scientific writings and books, and that's not always going to be obviously available, despite being a professional."
But Schmidt was getting sick even as he got on the train. He documented everything he experienced in the next several hours in his diary, in graphic detail.
[Sept. 25] 4:30-5:30 strong nausea, but without vomiting, during trip to Homewood on suburban train.
5:30-6:30 strong chill & shaking, followed by fever of 101.7°, which did not persist (blankets and heating pad). Bleeding of mucous membranes in the mouth began about 5:30, apparently mostly from gums.
8:30 P.M. Ate 2 pieces milk toast.
9:00 P.M.-12:20 A.M. — Slept well. No blood in urine before going to sleep, but very small amount of urine. Urination at 12:20 AM mostly blood, but small in amount. Mouth had bled steadily as shown by dried blood at both angles of mouth.
A good deal of abdominal pain, mainly from gas, continuing to 1:00 PM, only inadequately relieved by belching.
A little fitful sleep until 4 A.M. when I took an enema (bowels having failed to move the previous day).
Took a glass of water at 4:30 A.M., followed by violent nausea and vomiting, the contents of the stomach being the undigested supper. Felt much better and slept until 6:30 A.M.
Sept. 26. 6:30 A.M. Temperature 98.2°
Ate cereal & poached egg on toast & applesauce & coffee for breakfast at 7.
Slight bleeding is now going on in the bowels, with frequent irritation at the anus. No urine, with an oz. or so of blood about every three hours (instead of the several oz. of urine to be expected). Mouth and nose continuing to bleed, not excessively.
There, the diary ends. According to an article in the research journal Copeia, Schmidt was up and about and feeling better later on the morning of Thursday, Sept. 26.
"In fact, he felt so well at about 10 o'clock that he telephoned to the Museum to expect him at work the next day," herpetologist and Field coworker Clifford Hillhouse Pope wrote in Copeia.
But things quickly took a turn for the worse. Schmidt got up to eat at noon, but threw up after lunch and soon began to have difficulty breathing.
"This grew worse until his labored efforts could be heard all over the house. At the onset of these alarming symptoms, Mrs. Schmidt called the inhalator squad and the family physician," Pope wrote. "Attempts at resuscitation at first brought warmth back to Dr. Schmidt's hands and normal color to his face, but his restoral was of short duration. He was transported to the hospital where he arrived shortly before 3:00 p.m. and was promptly pronounced dead from respiratory paralysis."
An autopsy discovered extensive internal bleeding, with massive hemorrhages in Schmidt's large and small intestines, and bleeding in his brain, his kidneys, and elsewhere in his body, Pope wrote.
On Oct. 3, 1957, a transcript of Schmidt's diary was published in the Chicago Tribune.
A daredevil? Probably not
Many may wonder what Schmidt was thinking. Was he really so hardcore, perhaps so stubborn and hubristic, that he consciously decided to do nothing about a snakebite that was making him seriously ill other than transcribe his symptoms in a journal?
Pope did not think so at the time, and Ruane doesn't think so either.
Pope wrote that nearly two decades before Schmidt suffered the fatal bite, a study out of South Africa had shown boomslang venom had "an extraordinarily high toxicity, even higher than those of such notorious snakes as cobras, kraits, and mambas." But the boomslang that bit Schmidt was a very young snake, and only one fang penetrated deeply.
"He might not have thought it was medically significant," Ruane said. "There's no reason to think if he thought getting bit by a boomslang was going to be a big deal, he probably would not have been handling it so casually."
But even if Schmidt was aware of the kind of danger he might have been in, Ruane said there was little he could do.
Some snakebites can be treated with polyvalent antivenom, which can be used for multiple snake species. This is not the case for boomslangs.
"Boomslang antivenom is monovalent. It only works for boomslangs," Ruane said. "Other antivenom is not going to be particularly effective, and it certainly was not going to be available in Chicago in the 1950s."
French scientist Albert Calmette developed the first antivenom against the cobra in the 1890s, and the H.K. Mulford Company of Philadelphia advertised itself as the first company licensed to produce antivenom in the U.S. in 1957, the National Museum of American History noted.
But none of that would have been of much use to Schmidt. Ruane was not sure when boomslang antivenom specifically would have come on the market, but even if it had been around by 1957, it would not have been available in the U.S. for a snake native to a different part of the world.
"Even now, one of the risks or dangers of having venomous snakes that are from other countries as pets — particularly as pets in private homes — is that antivenom. If you live in the middle of nowhere and you're keeping cobras, cobra antivenom isn't going to be available at your local hospital, and the one that we have in the U.S. isn't going to be effective against it," Ruane said, "and so you would have to end up getting airlifted to a major port city that brings, or a major zoo that has it on hand, and hope they're going to share."
It's likely that Schmidt was left with no choice but to resign himself to the circumstances once he realized what was happening.
"It's quite possible he also realized: 'Well, there's nothing that's going to be available that's going to treat this for me, so either I'm going to power through it and be lucky, or this is it — there's nothing,'" said Ruane. "He could have gone to the hospital and probably get painkillers, or something that might have helped or might have even potentially saved him. But there certainly wasn't the appropriate medical treatment at that time anywhere he would have been able to access."
Other herpetologists have died under similar circumstances more recently.
In 1975, German herpetologist Robert Mertens, was feeding his pet savanna twig when the snake bit his thumb. Published reports note that even though the same snake had bitten him previously with no consequences, he died 18 days later.
In 2001, herpetologist Joe Slowinski, curator of herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, was on a field expedition in Myanmar when an assistant handed him a snake he thought to be harmless in a cloth bag. But the black-and-white banded snake was a krait, a highly venomous snake from the elapid family.
Krait venom is a neurotoxin that Ruane said will "make it so your neurons stop firing and talking to each other," leading to paralysis and an inability to breathe.
Others on the expedition tried to keep Slowinski alive through artificial respiration, but he could not be evacuated back to the United States for treatment because he was bitten on Sept. 11, 2001, the same day as the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Slowinski died the following day.
Honoring Schmidt's achievements
Ruane said Schmidt deserves to be remembered for more than just the salacious story of his death and the graphic diary he kept of his last several hours.
His research and discoveries advanced the understanding of herpetology and even zoology more broadly, and his work inspires those in the field to this day.
In particular, Ruane said, Schmidt advanced the concept of faunal regions, or zoogeographic regions — the practice of dividing the world up into regions where specific animals originate.
"Each one of these regions is going to have a group of flora and fauna that is very specific to that region," Ruane explained, "and it's easy to divide these animals up, and a lot of times, they don't cross into the next region."
Schmidt divided the world into three faunal regions, fewer than zoologists use today, but Ruane said it was still "a huge advancement in this idea of how we study biodiversity and where animals live."
Ruane also emphasized Schmidt's discoveries and descriptions of many new reptile and amphibian species, like his 1932 discovery of one specific snake that had never been seen before and has never been seen since.
"One of Schmidt's big interests as a scientist was in coral snakes. And while doing a coral snake dissection, he actually found inside the coral snake another snake," Ruane explained. "Coral snakes love to eat things that are shaped like snakes, so they eat eels, they eat other snakes, they eat legless lizards, they eat a whole bunch of snake-shaped items and so Schmidt's doing this dissection, he pulls the snake out of the coral snake's stomach... [and it's the] only time that snake had ever been seen."
That snake was named Geophis dunni, or Dunn's earth snake. There have been similar stories since; in 1976, palm harvesters in the Mexican state of Chiapas found a strange colubrid snake partially digested in the body of a coral snake, which was christened Cenaspis aenigma and deemed a representative of a new species and genus in 2018.
No one has ever found another Dunn's earth snake — or another Cenaspis aenigma.
"Again, Schmidt's death and how that happened is extremely interesting from a lot of perspectives. It's always, you know, it's got this element of the macabre that I think appeals to people just in general," Ruane said. "But there's all these other things about Schmidt that are super-interesting from the scientific perspective."
Right now at the Field Museum through April 5, 2026, the Reptiles Alive! offers an immersive herpetology experience for all ages. The highlights include 20 live reptiles on view as well as videos and multimedia presentations, and skeletons and other artifacts from the museum's collections.
"Not everybody stops and reads everything in an exhibit," Ruane said. "But I think that people are drawn to learning more about that, and I think, or I hope that when they get to the end and they see the dedication to him, I hope they appreciate that he was a really important guy."