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ministration of potash internally and externally, by 

 draughts, enemata, fomentations, baths, &c. Suffice it to say, 

 that of the three cases thus treated, one was' Dr. Shortt's 

 own snake-catcher, the second was a pariah coachman 

 bitten in the evening by a snake which the man said 

 was a cobra, the third was the case attributed to the 

 bite of a Bungarus and to which I have already alluded. 

 In the first case the local treatment (incision and suction) 

 at once adopted appears to deserve more credit than the 

 antidotal treatment afterwards employed ; in the last two 

 cases the evidence is very unsatisfactory. Dr. Shortt considers 

 that potash neutralizes snake poison ; brandy administered 

 along with it " roused the nervous system, excited the 

 circulation, and thus carried the potash into it as rapidly as 

 possible and enabled it to overtake the poison in the blood." 

 — (Madras Medical Journal, May 1872). Unfortunately 

 for the theory as well as for the practice of the treatment it 

 does not succeed even in the hands of its inventor, for the 

 cobra-bitten dogs into the blood of which Dr. Shortt injected 

 potash died as surely as those into which he injected 

 ammonia or those he left alone. The only dog which 

 survived (and it had a naiTow escape) was injected with 

 somewhat less than a grain of dry poison dissolved in two 

 drachms of water and then mixed with half a drachm of 

 solution of caustic potash.* Now we know that caustic 

 potash in tolerably concentrated solution destroys many 

 organic principles (such as that of hyoscyamus), so this 

 solitary exception is easily accounted for. A drachm of 

 Liquor potassse added to a draught containing hyoscyamus 

 would by destroying the narcotic prevent it from taking 

 effect, but there would be little chance indeed of draughts 

 containing Liquor potassse having any beneficial effect on a 

 patient who had taken an over-dose of hyoscyamus. It is 



* Eeports of Dr. Shortt's public experiments, Madras Medical 

 Journal, March, April, May, 1870. 



