Medicine: Snakes

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Where the fangs enter, a sharp burning pain is immediately felt. It gets worse. The wounds bleed; the parts get blue and swell. Numbness sets in and spreads; vomiting begins; breathing becomes difficult; paralysis starts. The victim suffocates, dies. Each year some 5,000 such tortured deaths occur in India. In the U. S. last year there were 27 reported. There might have been more, for at least 507 persons here were bitten by rattlers, moccasins, copperheads, massasaugas and corals. They are the only poisonous snakes in Canada and the U. S. More of the bitten might have died, had it not been for the antivenin developed by the Antivenin Institute of America and sold by H. K. Mulford Co., both of Philadelphia.

Last week the man at present most active in the world for snake poison research debarked at Manhattan. He was Dr. Afranio do Amaral, the soft-voiced suave herpetologist. He came from Brazil† where he is director of the Institute Sorotherapico at Butantan, State of Sao Paulo. His mission was to give a talk or two at Harvard's School of Public Health, where he is formally a lecturer, and to confer with Mulford's President Milton Campbell, his good friend and supporter. Dr. do Amaral is consulting director of Mulford's Antivenin Institute of America.

That snake bite poisoning can be counteracted by a horse serum was discovered 25 years ago by Dr. Albert Calmette of the Paris Pasteur Institute. He injected first small doses of cobra venom, then increasingly larger doses into a horse, progressively the horse's blood developed proper antibodies. That horse's serum cured cobra bites—if used promptly, for cobra venom kills very quickly.

Brazil, infested with snakes, followed up his work. Its Institute of Serum Therapy soon became the world's foremost. Mulford's Antivenin Institute now ranks well with it.

Dr. do Amaral's work developing serums against U. S. snake bites was relatively easy. He had the technique of production. There remained to make a survey of noxious U. S. reptiles. He found only 19 kinds of them. Thirteen belonged to the rattler (Crotalus) family. Others were massasauga and pigmy rattler (Sistrurus family), copperhead and cottonmouth moccasin (Agkistrodon family), coral and harlequin (Micrurus family). Harlequins and corals are rare, appearing only in the south. Moccasins and copperheads frequent the southeastern and eastern states.

Identifying poisonous snakes is easy. Most of them belong to the pit-viper family. They have a deep depression between eye and nostril. Heads are flat and triangular, necks thin, bodies stout, tails short, eyes with elliptical pupils like a cat's. Fangs fold back against the roof of the mouth. A single row of scales runs along the belly. The biggest U. S. snake is the eastern diamond-back rattler, which grows to nine feet.

Contrary to lore snakes do not attack humans wantonly. They are lazy and timid and do not strike unless hurt or threatened with hurt. Exceptions are the African mamba, the Malayan King, the bushmaster of the tropics, and cascavel (a rattler) of Central America. A coach whip will sometimes follow a man. But it is only curious, and will speed away if threatened.

Dr. do Amaral, first at Manhattan and then at Mulford's in Philadelphia, last week repeated his standardized method of dealing with snake bites: