Word: venom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Milking rattlesnakes of their venom is relatively easy. During his 35 years as consulting curator of reptiles at the San Diego Zoo, Klauber milked 5,171 of them by opening their mouths with a metal claw, hooking their fangs over the edge of a cup and pressing out the contents of their poison glands. The venom, he says, is almost odorless. Its taste is first astringent, then turns sweetish. It makes the lips tingle a little...
Ethereal Delights. Rattlesnake venom, says Klauber, has, at various times, been considered a cure for epilepsy, bronchitis, pneumonia, neuralgia, lumbago, sciatica, cholera, yellow fever, leprosy and elephantiasis. Pills made out of the poison glands ground up and mixed with cheese were once prescribed for palsy and typhus; they also give a feeling of "ethereal delights." Rattlesnake oil was once a popular remedy, too, but both venom and oil have now fallen out of medical favor. The chief modern use for the venom is to immunize horses so their serum can be used to cure rattlesnake bites...
...fangs in a small, warm animal, it does not try to hold it. The animal runs a few feet or yards until the poison brings it down. Then the snake follows by scent, flicking its delicate tongue, and starts the slow business of swallowing the meal. The injected venom contains a substance that starts the digestive process before the animal reaches the snake's stomach...
Popular remedies for rattlesnake bite are as numerous as the diseases that venom was once supposed to cure. Klauber lists onions, garlic, chewed tobacco, ammonia, kerosene, gunpowder, nitric acid, lye, quicklime, and freshly killed chickens, split and applied to the wound. All such nostrums are useless, as is the classic remedy, whisky, which Klauber thinks has killed many snakebite victims who would have recovered if left untreated. The only effective drug is antivenin, which must be used with care. Best first-aid treatment is a ligature or tourniquet to isolate the bitten part of the body. The wound should...
...national horizon as strapping (6 ft., 196 lbs.) Herman Eugene Talmadge, 43, segregationist and isolationist, takes the seat of one of the U.S.'s great senatorial statesmen, aging (78) and respected Walter George. To outward appearances, Herman has progressed not only beyond his father's viciousness and venom but beyond the uncertainties that haunted the brash youth who seized the governorship in Atlanta that rainy night nearly ten years ago. Smooth and suave as an actor, Herman in his "tel-lee-vision" (as he calls it) appearances has convinced Georgians "that a Talmadge doesn't have horns...