On snake poison : its action and its antidote / by A. Mueller.

  • Mueller, A.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On snake poison : its action and its antidote / by A. Mueller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    100/108 (page 84)
    for the child was rapidly sinking and had almost ceased to breathe. One twelfth of a grain of strychnine was therefore injected in the arm, a bold dose for so young a child, but, as the result showed, exactly the one that was required. The test was eminently successful. Having to leave the child immediately after the injec- tion, the writer on returning in half an hour found his little patient sitting up in bed, perfectly restored, with both poisons so completely neutralising each other, that not a trace of either could be detected. Thus the writer’s structure was at last completed, and an insignificant spider furnished the last material required for an important discovery. There are a few hypothetical points yet in the ex- planation of some of the symptoms of snakebite- poisoning by the writer’s theory, but these imperfec- tions are more those of science than of the theory. The whole subject of vaso-motor paralysis for instance, and of the pathological changes that follow it, is more or less a terra incognita. Diapedesis is now supposed to be the result of blood pressure, but it occurs in snakebite, when blood pressure is at zero. Feoktistow, we have seen, produced it locally on the mesentery of animals with normal blood pressure, whilst Banerjee arrested by strychnine-injections profuse haemorrhages from all the mucous surfaces, which were no doubt the result of diapedesis. • We know that neither snake- poison nor strychnine affect the nerve ends but only the nerve cells. There must therefore be nerve cells at or near the terminations of the nerves regulating