SNAKE-BITE SECRETS.

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17112, 6 April 1921, Page 8

SNAKE-BITE SECRETS.

TEICKS OP CHARMERS

A professor of medicine writes in the London "Daily Mail":— > The snake charmer keeps his cobra in a basket, and grips it behind the head while it lies coiled asleep. The snaho has to arch itself up and strike downwards, and as it is slow to do this, tho charmer easily gets his grip first. ' When the cobra is arched up and striking down, its sting cah be avoided by passing the arm in towards tiie snake under the arch but one would have to be cool and well trained to remember to do this, the -instinct being to draw away from the blow. The charmer "milks'- the cobra by making it bite a piece of meat; tne muscle of the poison gland can cause the expulsion of two-thirds, no more, ot the poison content. _ , On making the snake bite again only a very little of the remaining third can be expelled, not enough to poison one, so the charmer now lets the cobra bite him. . ~ Then.he applies to the place tne enake-stone, which he pretends will cure the sting. Next he. makes the cobra bite a fowl, and this time (he grips-the poison gland with his finger # and squeezes out enough of the remaining poison to make the fowl die. Thus the curative power of the enake-stone is deceitfully established. _ > The native grass-cutters in India bitten on a finger-niay at once cut this off and thus save themselves from death The alternative to amputation is to twist a tourniquet immediately round the poisoned limb, so as to arrest the circulation, and then cut inttf the bitten part and rub in permanganate potash so as to destroy the poison. An antivenin is prepared by inoculating horses with non-deadly doses or cobra venom, each successive dose being made stronger. To effect a cure the horse serum containing an antivenin requires to be injected straight into a vein, and with very little loss of time. There is then almost no, chance of using antivenin in the jungle. It may help to save life when small doses of poison have been received, and the patient survives twelve hours or more, but in the case of big doses, when death occurs in an hour or two, there k little chance of its use afferding any help. Snake-venom acts both on the blood a"nd on the tissues. A cat is far more immune to cobra, venom than is a rabtjjt, arid this is found to he the case not only for the whole animal, but also for the. excised heart, or intestine, which has been washed free of blood and kept alive, as it can be, in a warm, oxygenated solution of those inorganic salts which are naturally present in the blood. So, too, in the animal immunised by a dose of antivenin; ,tbe immunity is found to pertain not only to the living animal but, also to its exwsed living tissues. ' '.

It is an important point to have settled that the poisoning ; and immunity to the poisoning depends not so much on the blood as on the tissues of the body. Colmuvenom particularly attacks the. nervous system. As the venoms of oobra and'vipers are not she same; antivenin is prepared by the injection into the horse of a mixture of venoms.

/Many thousands of deaths are reported each year in India as, due to snakebite, but some of these may conceal murders, the secret commission oFwhieh is made easy by the natural danger from snakes. • \