TREATMENT OF POISONOUS SNAKE-BITES 267 
quantity of serum that must be injected in order to prevent death 
is about thrice as great as that which neutralises in vitro the dose 
of venom inoculated. 
It is also found that the amount of curative serum that an 
animal intoxicated by venom must receive is inversely proportional 
to its weight. 
The experiments upon dogs, performed at the Pasteur Institute 
at Lille by my collaborator C: Guérin, are highly demonstrative 
in this respect.! 
A dog of 12 kilogrammes, inoculated with 9 milligrammes of 
venom (a dose lethal to controls of the same weight in from five 
to seven hours), is completely cured on receiving, two hours after 
inoculation with the poison, 10 c.c. of serum. 
When the treatment does not take place until three hours after 
the injection of the venom, it is necessary to inject 20 cc. of serum 
in order to prevent the animal from dying. With a longer delay 
than this, death is inevitable, since the bulbar centres are already 
affected, and paralysis of the respiratory muscles commences to 
appear. 
These facts show that :— 
(1) The more sensitive animals are to venom, the greater is the 
quantity of serum necessary in order to prevent their intoxication 
by a given dose of venom. 
(2) For a given species of animal and a given dose of venom, 
the longer the delay in applying the remedy, the greater is the 
quantity of serum that must be injected in order to arrest the 
poisoning. 
It will be understood from what has been already stated, that 
a man weighing 60 kilogrammes, if bitten by a snake which 
injects, let us say, what would amount to 20 milligrammes of 
venom if collected in the dry state (the mean quantity that a 
l“Les morsures de vipères chez les animaux,” Recueil de médecine vétéri- 
naire @ Alfort, May 15, 1897. 
