UNSUCCESSFUL CASES. 



Considering the newness of the strychnine treat- 

 ment it would be folly to expect that the conditions 

 necessary to insure success should have been observed 

 in every case, and that every practitioner should at 

 once have made himself familiar with it and the theory 

 on which it is founded. Hence a few failures were un- 

 avoidable. Of these a record has been kept, but for 

 obvious reasons the writer withholds it here. To give 

 names and dates would be invidious, though the 

 opponents of the treatment have exultingly pointed to 

 the few deaths that have occurred as palpable proofs 

 of its uselessness, some of them even going so far as to 

 ascribe these deaths to the direct action of the antidote. 

 There is, however, not a single case on record, in 

 which death took place under strychnine-convulsions. 

 All the patients died under palpable symptoms of snake- 

 bite-poisoning. As these symptoms have now been 

 proven beyond all doubt to yield to strychnine, when 

 properly administered, the inference that it was not so 

 administered in the cases referred to becomes not only 

 justifiable, but unavoidable. In one case only, that of 

 a child of tender years, blood was vomited so copiously 

 that death may be ascribed to that cause and the 

 snake-poison combined, but in all the other six fatal 



