1/15 each,
which of course had no effect and the patient is allowed to die without
any further effort on the part of her medical attendant. Case 2.--A boy
of 10 years is admitted to a N. S. Wales hospital in a state of complete
collapse, barely alive, having been bitten by a brown snake 22 hours
before admission. Instead of a rousing injection of at least 15 minims
and the same or smaller ones repeated at short intervals, he receives
only 5 minims of liq. strychniae P.B. every twenty minutes, when death
was imminent, and dies 65 minutes after admission. Case 3 is also that
of a boy in an hospital. He is admitted fully conscious and apparently
but slightly under the influence of snake-poison, for a five minims
injection is reported to have removed the symptoms. On the following
day, however, he became comatose, and instead of having the antidote
freely administered, gets only one more injection of five minims and
dies in coma. Case 4 is even worse. A little girl of 3 years, bitten by
a tiger snake, receives three minim injections every half-hour, and
after three of them, whilst in a state of complete coma, gets
convulsions. These are attributed to the strychnine, which thereupon is
withheld, the finale being death in coma.

There can be no doubt that in all these cases life could have been
preserved under a more energetic treatment. Hereafter, when theory and
treatment are better understood, and when officialdom has seen fit to
issue instructions as to the proper treatment of snakebite to medical
practitioners, such cases as those cited will be put down as malpractice
and have to be accounted for. Until then the guardians of the health and
the lives of her Majesty's subjects, and a certain portion of the
medical press of Australia, superciliously and persistently ignoring the
subject, are more responsible for the lives lost than the busy country
practitioner, who may not have had time or opportunity to inform himself
thoroughly on a comparatively new subject, more especially at a period
when Banerjee had not yet taught us that in administering strychnine as
antidote to snake-poison we can venture into grains of it with impunity.

* * * * *

Since the above chapters were put in proof, the writer has seen a fatal
case of tiger snake bite, conveying two lessons of such interest and
importance that it must be placed on record here. It illustrates in an
extraordinary and forcible degree the er