Visha Kyanya - Truth Behind Fiction

The Visha Kanya (English: Poison girl), refers most often as fiction character with historic origin. They are young women used as assasins, often against powerful enemies and  mostly found in Indian mythology and literatures.

Visha Kanya were used by kings to destroy enemies during the times of the ancient India. The story goes that young girls were raised on a carefully crafted diet of poison and antidote from a very young age. Although many would not survive, those that did were immune to other poisons and their body fluids would be poisonous to others; sexual contact would thus be lethal to other humans.

To justify the authenticity of being a Visha Kanya we have to understand the concept of poison or venom.

Numbers of venomous creatures are found around us, snake is one of the most notorious among them. If snake bites someone its venom may cause one of two effects to our body

•  Venom may cut the nervous system, hence isolating the control of brain over various organs most importantly to Heart.
•  Venom mixed into blood may further dissolve body tissues to blood thus affecting natural body function.
   

To prevent this, an antidote of venom is prepared by injecting dilute solution of it into a horse (or ship), thus horse's immune system produces its own antidote or antibody against the venom which is further derived to give in form of injection to a human being bitten by snake.

In this way our body can develop a self antidote for  a particular or a group of venom if it is given in dilute amount, but problem is that to fight against the high concentrated venom injected by snake(or any venomous insect or reptile) needs a high concentration of antidote. Human body can not store such a high concentrated antidote over a long period, that why its sored in form anti-venom and given externally to the victim.

If someone started taking dilute amount of venom every month to keep his immune system ready to fight against any external poison or venom given to him we will have a profound amount of anti-venom stored in his body and note that it will be the anti-venom (antidote) which will be stored by taking small quantity of poison or venom over a long period.

If the theory behind origin of Visha Kanya is treating them with poison over childhood , they would grow into a living antidote, and their bite or somehow contact to another person will result as sharing of a useful antidote not the deadly poison. And yes, it is way similar to vaccination.

This way, a person sharing blood, saliva or sexual contact with Visha Kanya will go vaccinated against any future snakebite. Thus Visha Kanya would have been much useful(and may be pretty as well) than dangerous.

QuickFact When taken orally it is called poison, when injected by some other means like bite or syringe it is called venom, otherwise both are same thing and have same hazardous effect to anatomy.

Laboratories use extracted snake venom to produce antivenom. Photo: Wikipedia