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.

    91/108 (page 75)
    There can be no 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