HISTORICAL REVIEW. 9 



to the strychnine treatment it would, therefore, be 

 folly to complain, but just cause of complaint is 

 furnished by the unscientific attitude which was 

 assumed from the very first and has been maintained 

 throughout by its opponents. 



Not a single attempt has been made to disprove 

 the correctness of the theory on which it is founded, 

 yet to leave this theory unquestioned but object to the 

 conclusion to which it leads, must strike even the lay 

 mind as a most illogical proceeding. It is self-evident 

 that, when strychnine is administered as an antidote to 

 snake-poison, the quantity of it injected must be in 

 proportion to that of snake-venom present in the sys- 

 tem, and that the doses in which we dispense it in ordin- 

 ary practice must be entirely left out of sight. Still, in 

 the face of these obvious conclusions, we have had 

 veterans, grave and grey, arguing pompously that the 

 heroic doses advocated by the writer could not be 

 countenanced, and that even medical men could not be 

 entrusted with the serious task of administering them. 

 Even as late as the last medical congress at Sydney 

 this absurd objection to large doses of the antidote 

 was again brought forward. After quantities averag- 

 ing from half a grain to a grain have been injected 

 many times in Australia with continuous success, 

 after Banerjee has even gone as high as three and 

 four grains in India without a single failure, and with- 

 out in one single instance serious strychnine symptoms 

 being evoked, the writer of the paper on " Snakebite 

 and its Cure" based his principal objection to the 



