POISONOUS SNAKES OF NORTH AMERICA. 469 



consequently be such as will stimulate the vital functions of respiration 

 and circulation. 



The remedy which to them seemed to hohl forth the greatest promise 

 of success was alcohol, a stimulant the effects of which are well known ; 

 which IS, moreover, usually readily at hand, and which has been exten- 

 sively tried for the purpose. It has been used both by the layman and 

 the practitioner, often with apparent success, and its application has 

 undoubtedly saved many a life. On the other hand, reports are numer- 

 ous ot patients having died which were under the influence of liquor 

 when bitten, or to whom whisky was afterwards administered. But it 

 is safe to say that in most of these cases the alcohol had been taken in 

 excess so as to depress instead of stimulate the vital functions. It 

 can not be emphasized too much, or too often, that intoxication, so far 

 from helping the cure, helps the poison, and that persons having been 

 made intoxicated beyond excitement, when under treatment for snake 

 bite, and yet recovered, have so recovered not from the treatment but 

 in spite of It. It should also be remembered that the alcohol has no 

 beneficent direct action upon the venom ; on the contrary, applied 

 locally or intravenously, it seems to add to the virulence of the poison 

 Notwithstanding all that has been written about the utter uselessness 

 of ammonia, we see still occasionally in medical literature reports from 

 physicians who have obtained cures in spite of its application. Injected 

 directly, it is worse than useless. It should not at this late date be 

 necessary to fill pages m order to emphasize this fact, which has been 

 conclusively demonstrated by all rational experiments from the time of 

 Fontaua to that of Mitchell and the other physiologists of to-day 

 Internally, as a stimulant, it has also been shown to be much inferior to 

 alcohol. The radical defect of ammonia in severe cases consists in the 

 fact that It increases the arterial pressure, thus aiding the poison in 

 producing the internal hemorrhages. 



The remedy which has come prominently to the front during the last 

 five years, however, and wliich really seems to come up to all reason- 

 able expectation, is a poison scarcely less terrible than the snake venom 

 Itself, VIZ, strychnine. The theory upon which the application of this 

 drug has been based is, on the one hand, that the snake poison acts as 

 a specific nerve poison, depressing and more or less suspending the 

 luuctiou of the motor nerve centers throughout the body without inter- 

 fering with the structure of the nerve cells, and, on the other, that the 

 physiological action of strychnine upon the same organs is diamet- 

 rically opposed to the action of the venom, or, in brief, that ^' strychnine 

 IS the exact antithesis of snake poison in its action." To use the words 

 of the main advocate of strychnine as an antidote : 



WhiJ.st suake poison turns off the motor batteries and reduces the volume and force 

 ot motor-nerve currents, strychnine, Avheu following it as an antidote, turns them 

 on again, acting with the unerring certainty of a chemical test, if admnistered in 

 sufficient quanUty. Purely physiological in its action, it neutralizes the effects of the 



