Remarks on snake venom and its antidotes / by T. Lauder Brunton.

  • Brunton, Thomas Lauder, Sir, 1844-1916.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on snake venom and its antidotes / by T. Lauder Brunton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    10/15 (page 6)
    Joseph Fayrer, two pariah dogs which had been bitten by cobras died in tetanic spasms after the injection of one- third and one-fourth of a grain of strychnine respectively. With care to give the strychnine in divided doses, and to watch the result it might be very useful and is well worthy of a trial, for it might perhaps maintain the respiration and circulation until the patient recovered. But the depression of the respiration and heart are not the only effects of the poison, and violent vomiting is some- times a very marked symptom, to say nothing of the haemoptysis, haematuria, and discharge of blood by the motions which occasionally occur. Strychnine will not counteract these effects of the poison, and in order to pre- vent their occurrence we must try to aid its elimination. In thinking over what channels were most likely to serve this purpose, it has seemed to me that the salivary glands and the mucous membrane of the stomach and intestines are the most likely. Fayrer^^ found that venomous snakes appear to resist the action of large doses of venom injected into them, while non-venomous succumb, and this might be explained by supposing that the poison glands of the former excrete the injected venom just as the liver will excrete foreign bile injected into the duodenum. The non- venomous snakes, having no poison glands, would be unable to excrete the poison, and would therefore die. My friend Dr. Abeles presented me with two fine specimens of the cerastes, in order that I might test this hypothesis by excising the poison gland in one and seeing whether its resistant power to venom disappeared with the gland, but unfortunately they both died before the experiment could be performed. Fayrer and I found that the cobra venom had an extra- ordinary irritant action on mucous membranes, and when it was introduced into the stomach of a frog it caused most violent vomiting, very unusual in that animal. This ex- periment suggests that the vomiting which forms such a prominent symptom in many cases may be due to the poison being excreted by the mucous membrane of the stomach, in much the same way as tartar emetic or apo- morphine would be. If this hypothesis is correct we can readily understand why recovery may occur to a great extent as in the case of the animal treated with artificial Fayrer, Thanatophidia oflndia^ p. 75.