EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS. 437 
the use of its muscles, brain, and nervous system to a certain 
degree. Yet although the dog did not eventually recover, the 
experiment demonstrated clearly that an animal apparently 
dead of snake venom could at least be temporarily revived. 
The dose of venom was evidently too great in this case to 
make recovery possible. In the case of curare the same thing 
happens. If the dose is large, artificial respiration methods 
fail to revive the victim. 
The power of resistance to snake venom is much greater in 
vigorous, healthy human beings than it is in most animals such 
as dogs, monkeys, goats, sheep, rabbits. A full bite from an 
adult Cobra will kill a large dog or monkey within an hour In 
my experiments some died in ten minutes. A healthy human 
being would survive from two to six hours. 
Dr. Vincent Richards succeeded in keeping a man bitten by 
an Indian Cobra alive for thirty hours by means of artificial 
respiration after normal breathing had ceased. Now, if it is 
possible to keep a man alive for thirty hours in this way, it is 
quite possible to save his life, because if anti-venene has been 
injected in sufficient quantity into a vein, it will neutralize the 
poison if the victim can be kept alive long enough. If a sufficient 
dose of anti-venene has been injected into a man and he should 
cease to breathe an hour or two later, it indicates that the remedy 
has not had sufficient time to penetrate into the lymph, and come 
into sufficiently close contact with the poisoned nerve, brain, 
and blood cells to exert its venom-neutralizing properties. 
Therefore if the patient can be kept alive for a few hours by 
means of artificial respiration and so give the anti-venene time 
to act fully upon the poison, there is no reason why he should 
not make a complete recovery. Of course, in these cases the 
anti-venene would have to be injected direct into a vein and in 
liberal quantities. 
During the whole time artificial breathing methods were 
being carried on, the anti-venene would be busy preventing the 
venom from mixing with the nerve and blood cells. 
