147 



short time and it was with some little difficulty the man 

 shook it off.*** The man came at once to hospital, bemg 

 advised by one of his comrades to do so, when on the way he 

 became very weak. The apothecary saw the patient on his 

 arrival at hcspital. It is supposed that a lapse of 20 minutes 

 must have occurred from the time he received the bite until 

 he reached the hospital and nothing had been done mean- 

 while in the way of remedies. The Apothecary immediately 

 scarified the wounded finger freely, made the patient suck 

 the wound and administered ammonia." For twelve hours 

 no prominent symptoms appeared beyond swelling of the 

 arm, restlessness and slight feverishness. Next morning he 

 was found in a state of collapse, soon became unconscious 

 and died 27 hours after the bite. 



Bungarus arcuatus. Little is known about the effect 

 of the poison of this snake on man, for the snake is very 

 inoffensive and large specimens of it are rare ; out of 10,810 

 deaths by snake-bite registered in 1869 in Bengal and the 

 Provinces under the Supreme Government, 359 wei-e ascrib- 

 ed to the ' krait.' From experiments on animals it appears to 

 be as deadly as the cobra. A case of suake-bite admitted 

 into the Madras hospital in May 16th, 1871, the man having 

 been " bitten by a snake the character of which he could 

 not recognize, on the dorsum of his left foot at 7 P. M. last 

 night"* is attributed by Dr. Shortt to this snake. The man 

 was admitted 9 hours after the accident, put on Dx\ Shortt's 

 potash treatment 17 hours after (when we may say that im- 

 mediate danger had passed) and recovered slowly from the 

 secondary consequences in four days. In the words of Dr. 

 Shortt, " This is the 3rd case of snake-bite cured by the 

 potash treatment, the two first were occasioned by cobras 

 and the present one by a Bungarus." — (Madras Medical 

 Journal, May 1872.) The ground for the presumption that 



* Dr. Paul's Report, Madras Medical Journal, August 1871. 



