Medicine: Snakes

At Luxor, Egypt, all travelers who pay may hear a fat & sleek native gentleman mumble and whistle and beat a tambour.

Anon a cobra, no pretty worm of Nilus,* creeps out of nowhere at the feet of that most famed snake charmer of Egypt. It raises its head and a length of body clear of the ground, quite resembling a rat terrier expectantly sitting up for a titbit. As the fakir puffs his cheeks in hissing whistle, the cobra puffs its hood and lazily sways to the sibilancies.

In India snake charmers are an impoverished, filthy, untouchable lot of Jogis. With woven baskets containing their trained pythons or cobras they traipse about villages and towns. For an anna or two the charmer sets his serpent on the ground and blows through his pungi. The pungi is a bottle-shaped gourd with two reeds or bamboos inserted. One tube has finger stop-holes and emits a shrill penetrating whine. The other has no holes and gives out a drone. Snakes have no ears. But under their skin they have two primitive ear drums and through those the Indian snake feels the pungi's vibrations. And to them it wags its head like a tremulous dotard, puffing and belching the while.

Whether snakes respond instinctively to the charmer's whines and whistles is still an unsettled problem in animal psychology. Snakes have little brain and much spine. They are quick to respond to stimuli, and perhaps react directly to seductive vibrations. More probably their swaying—it is no dance—is a conditioned reflex. Charmers feed their snakes well, in India with milk, flour balls and meat (frogs). And it is doubtless with mounting hope of meals that snakes raise themselves to the fakir's minor music. Charmers who have tried their art in U. S. zoos and serpentaria have always failed, despite all their wheezing and whining.

Fakirs who dally with venomous snakes take good care to defang them. The fangs are long, hollow teeth connecting with venom sacs in the snake's upper jaw. When the fangs puncture animal, fish or reptile the venom (in most snakes a yellowish fluid) is squeezed, like a hypodermic injection, into the victim's flesh. Hindus defang their serpents by searing the jaws with hot irons. Others rip the fangs out with pincers or flick a cloth at the snake's head until the fangs are caught in the cloth and yanked out. Defanged snakes quickly grow new fangs.

All snake venom is highly virulent;* Hindus have discovered, however, that if it is highly diluted and given as homeopathic doses, it is very stimulating to animals. Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, Indian plant biologist, in his books (Longmans, Green, U. S. publishers) declares the diluted venom stimulating to plants also.

But normal venom kills with more or less speed. Cleopatra and Charmian dying within a few moments of their asp bites was no Shakespearean fairytale. The quietness of their death, however, was. Venom attacks the nerves as well as muscles. It causes profuse bleeding.