Marvelous Cues of a Snakes bite.
--From a private letter from our coadjutor, ‘"G. W. K.,"’ in
Texas, under date of the 27th April, says the New Orleans Picayune, we copy the following interesting account of his success in treating the bite of a rattlesnake.
It may furnish a useful hint for future improvement:
Before I forget it, let me inform you that the medicine chest arrived in due season, and just as I opened it I had pressing use for one of the articles it contained.
I was looking over the bottles, when one of my men came running in, saying he had been bitten by a rattlesnake!
He was holding fast his left wrist, while two streams of blood were running from one of his fingers, where the ranges of the snake had entered.
As the man did not use tobacco, I told him to fill his mouth with salt and suck as hard as he could at his wounds.
I next kept a rag well saturated with hartshore on the wound, to counteract the poison.
I then put thirty drops of hartshore in a teacupful of whiskey and poured if down his throat.
In five minutes I repeated this dose, and in five minutes more I gave him another just like it--
By this time I had given him a full quart of strong whiskey and ninety drops of hartshorn, and thought the load was sufficient.--The man was an Irishman, an old soldier, and took the matter quite coolly.
It was a great satisfaction to him to know that another man had killed the snake, which was coiled under a rail he was moving, in the yard, not ten steps from the house.
For three-quarters of un hour he sat quietly, and talked soberly and coolly, while I kept renewing the hartshorn to the two wounds where the fangs of the snake had entered his flagger.
He said it was too bad to die from the bite of a ‘"pisen serpent,"’ while I was astonished he should keep so sober with such a load of raw whiskey on his stomach.
In about an hour he commenced to laugh, then to whistle, next to sing, and finally fried to dance.
I had him all right then; I knew that the whiskey had got ahead of the poison, and had reached his vitals first.
In five minutes more he was as drunk as
Bacchus, sprawled out on the floor, slept half a day, and next morning was at work as well as ever.
So much for the first case I ever cured with the contents of the medicine chest.
The hartshorn, combined with the whiskey, effected the thing.
