Word: cobra
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...diminished for several days. His doctor passed the remarkable news on to his colleagues and soon the Pasteur Institute in Paris began work on the use of animal poisons for relief of uncontrollable pain. That was ten years ago. Most practical poison to use, the French scientists discovered, is cobra venom, which is easy to extract, measure and inject. Fortnight ago, in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Robert Northwall Rutherford of Brookline, Mass. issued a set of standard directions on the everyday use of cobra venom...
Adventurer Miller tells how boys' noses are bored to take inch-wide bamboo plugs in each nostril, how a native village smells two days' travel away ("an acrid odor . . . like smoke from a bonfire of rubber boots"), how a trail-cutter can die from a cobra bite before hitting the ground. His accounts of jungle sex are more colorful if less accurate than an anthropologist's. For squeamish readers there is always the dedication: "To Mother...
...name of Allah, O snakes, come out of your holes," he chanted in archaic Arabic. Suddenly he sank to his knees, began to blow a slow, wailing melody on his reed pipe, swaying his body as he played. Out from hiding slid the hooded head of a young cobra, then another and another, until nine young reptiles appeared, raised their bodies from the ground and riveted their eyes on the charmer...
...convinced ambassador made ready to pay for this service, his servants warned that a huge, full-grown cobra was still in hiding. The charmer resumed his playing and swaying. Soon a much bigger snake than any of the captured nine twisted into the open, slithered across the ground and crawled into the bag with the others...
...nerve-blocking procedure in which alcohol, acetone and chloroform are used in addition to cobra and other venoms, although serving to alter transmission of impulses from and to the diseased muscles or painful areas and that way accomplishing the desired recovery of the part affected, has no paralyzing effect whatsoever either upon the nerves, muscles or parts. The treatment as applied serves to heal the diseased nerves and the patient is confined to the hospital bed only for a few hours...