HISTORICAL REVIEW. 



Snakebite and its cure have always been the 

 despair of medical science. On n'o other subject has 

 our knowledge remained for centuries so unsatisfactory, 

 fragmentary and empirical. The history of the subject, 

 in fact, may be summed up briefly as a series of vain 

 and spasmodic attempts to solve the problem of snake- 

 bite-poisoning and wring from nature the coveted 

 antidote. 



Various and contradictory theories of the action 

 of snake-poison have been propounded, some absolutely 

 erroneous, others containing a modicum" of truth mixed 

 with a large proportion of error, but none but one ful- 

 filling the indispensable condition of accounting for all 

 the phenomena observable during the poisoning process 

 and of reducing the formidable array of conflicting 

 symptoms to order by finding the law that governs 

 them all. We have the advocates of the blood-poison 

 theory ascribing the palpable nerve-symptoms to imag- 

 inary blood changes produced by the subtle poison, and 

 alleged to have been discovered by the willing, but 

 frequently deceiving microscope. Even bacteriology 

 has been laid under service and innocent leucocytes have 

 been converted under the microscope into deadly germs, 

 introduced by the reptile, multiplying with marvellous 

 rapidity in the blood of its victims, appropriating to 



