: The first
impression would be to rebel against the use of such substances as Crotalus, Lachesis, Apis and other animal poisons, and it is true that the lay mind must look
with something like horror upon their administration; but when they are properly used and
when we consider the dreadfulness of the necessity demanding them, and also when we have
ascertained that there can be no substitute when demanded, and again that they are
potentized and changed until they are perfectly pure, because reduced to a state of simple
substance, the horror passes away from the mind.
It is true that the diseases that call for the use of such substances as Crotalus are very grave. When at the bedside of a Crotalus patient one
feels that death is very near, the subject is horrible to look upon, and the mother in
regard to her child, or the husband, would immediately say,
"Doctor, use anything in order to save the life; resort to anything
in order to heal this sick one."
The symptoms are peculiar in Crotalus. The remedy
stands out by itself. There can be no substitute for it, as there is no other remedy, taken
as a whole, that looks it.
The other snake poisons form the nearest resemblance, but this one is the
most dreadful of all, excepting perhaps, the Ancistrodon contortrix (Copperhead).
In the case of snake bites we get the most dire effects; we see death
itself, we see the ending after a very rapid course, the very highest type of zymosis. These
snake poisons are supposed to be cyanhydrates of soda and other salts.
It is known that alcohol is the natural solvent of the cyanhydrates, and
because of this alcohol has been used in great quantities in snake bites, and it has
frequently prolonged and even saved life. If he lives through the violent attack he goes on
forever manifesting the chronic effects, and from these we have collected symptoms.
Dogs that have been bitten manifested the chronic effects of rattlesnake
bite, and in them a peculiar periodicity has been manifested, viz., every springas the cold weather
subsides and the warm days begin
I once had the privilege of tracing up a dog that had been bitten by the Cenchrisand had survived. It
was bitten in the region of the neck, and in that region a large abscess formed every spring
as long as that dog lived, until old age, when he died from that disease. The periodicity in
the snake poisons is related to the spring, to the coming on of the warm weather.
Another marked general feature in Crotalus, as in most of
the other Ophidians, is that the patient sleeps into the aggravation.
The poison of the Crotalus
horridus, in its earliest manifestations,
is like unto the zymotic changes that we find in scarlet fever, in diphtheria, in typhoid
and low forms of blood poisoning, those cases that come on with great rapidity, breaking
down of the blood, relaxation of the blood vessels, bleeding from all of the orifices of the
body, rapidly increasing unconsciousness like one intoxicated and besotted in appearance.
