EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS. 439 



Although this dog was, to all intents and purposes, dead, 

 yet under artificial respiration methods it revived, and recovered 

 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 curari 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. 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 in- 

 jected 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 sufiicient time to penetrate into the lymph, and 

 come into sufficiently close contact with the poisoned nerve 

 centres and endings 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. 



