UNstrccEssFtJL Cases. 75 



There can be lio doubt that in all these cases life 

 could have been preserved under a more energetic 

 treatment. Hereafter, when theory and treatment 

 are better understood, and when officialdom has seen 

 fit to issue instructions as to the proper treatment of • 

 snakebite to medical practitioners, such cases as those 

 cited will be put down as malpractice and have to be 

 accounted for. Until then the guardians of the health 

 and the lives of her Majesty's subjects, and a certain 

 portion of the medical press of Australia, superciliously 

 and persistently ignoring the subject, are more respon- 

 sible for the lives lost than the busy country practi- 

 tioner, who may not have had time or opportunity to 

 inform himself thoroughly on a comparatively new 

 subject, more especially at a period when Banerjee 

 had not yet taught us that in administering strychnine 

 as antidote to snake -poison we can venture into grains 

 of it with impunity. 



Since the above chapters were put in proof, the 

 writer has seen a fatal case of tiger snake bite, con- 

 veying two lessons of such interest and importance 

 that it must be placed on record here. It illustrates 

 in an extraordinary and forcible degree the erratic, 

 capricious, and insidious course the snake-poison takes 

 at times. 



A handsome girl of 17 is bitten in a bathroom on 

 the back of the second right toe at dusk on a Sunday 

 evening by a half-grown tiger snake, subsequently 

 caught and killed in the room. She does not suspect 



