Medicine: Snakes

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1) Catch the snake that did the biting. To identify it is to know what serum to use. Polyvalent serums are made, good against rattler, moccasin or copperhead bites. For other snakes specific anti-venoms must be used.

2) Apply a tourniquet above the knee or elbow whenever the bite is located below those levels. Release it every ten minutes to prevent gangrene.

3) Get the proper serum injected within 24 hours, the sooner the better.

4) Drink no alcohol at all. Use strychnine or coffee for stimulants. Cutting the wound and trying to suck out the venom is, he believes, useless.

Venom v. Epilepsy. When Dr. do Amaral reached Manhattan last week he had with him 40 South American snakes, present for Raymond Lee Ditmarks, curator of reptiles at the New York Zoological Park. Dr. Ditmarks fondly sorted the snakes. As he was doing so, Dr. Adolph Monaelesser, retired Manhattan physician, visited him. Dr. Monaelesser was President McKinley's surgeon of the Red Cross during the Spanish-American War. Lately he has been doing private research on epilepsy. His visit to the zoo was for some venom of the black African cobra. Dr. Ditmarks has the only one in the U. S. It is a peculiar snake, for it squirts its venom at its prey's (or enemy's) face. A drop of its venom blinds the eyes. Dr. Monaelesser hoped that a drop properly treated might be beneficial in epilepsy, nervous disease of obscure causes. So the two learned men tried to make the poor venomous fool angry and despatch his poison at a piece of glass. Perhaps wiser than most snakes, perhaps as lazy as most, the cobra spewed forth only a thin and useless spray. The two wise men felt foolish.