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.

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    treatment on the alleged ground of there not being sufficient evidence before us to justify heroic doses and show them to be safe in practice. When people wil- fully shut their eyes against the most conclusive evi- dence, it is improbable that any amount of it would satisfy them. Apart, however, from the fully proven antagonism between the two poisons rendering the large doses of the antidote,' which in all serious cases are indispensable, perfectly safe, the fear of strychnine is, in itself, a very strange aberration of judgment on the part of my opponents, considering how easy it is to counteract any noteworthy excess in its action, if. per- chance, it should occur through unnecessary overdosing, by appropriate remedies. All other objections to the treatment require but to be glanced at to show their absurdity. Certain crude experiments on dogs made many years ago in India, and put forward as irrefutable at first, have been abandoned of late, and my learned opponents have now taken up a position in their stronghold of statistics, supposed to be impregnable, but in reality only the last refuge of the destitute, a position from which, by dexterous handling of alleged facts, anything and everything can be proven, in short, to use a strong expression, not my own, a convenient and respectable form of lying. By means of these statistics they try to prove, in the first place, that Australian snake- poison is not at all the insidious death-dealing agent it is supposed to be, since, according to statistics, only 126 persons died from it in three colonies'within the