Book Description

Excerpt from The Texas Medical News, 1906, Vol. 16: A Journal of Medicine, Surgery and Hygiene, Devoted to the Interests of the Medical Profession of Texas and the Southwest The patient, if he passes safely through the strain of the first thirty-six or forty-eight hours, manifests the destructive influence of the venom upon the protoplasm of the blood corpuscles and tis sues, by more or less violent mental symptoms or exhaustion and coma. In many cases, however, where the patient is otherwise strong, he slowly recovers. Individuals weakened by disease, overwork, or insufficient food, which is generally the case with the poor Mexicans, are those in which the prognosis is unfavorable. The poison acts most readily upon warm-blooded animals, especially if injected into a vein, when death is often practically instantaneous, and the season of the year, more toxic, the hotter and the condition and the health of the snake, more so in the hungry. Rattlesnakes, like all snakes of the viperoid family, are born into the world. The mother will give birth, from the middle of July to the middle of August, to from six to twelve baby rattlers, about fourteen inches long, and no thicker than a lead pencil. The baby is self-reliant from birth and is provided with poison and fangs and is capable of self-existence without any assistance from its mother. Dangerous little fellows they are, marked like the adult snakes and provided with a single button at the end of the tail the first link in the series of rattles to be developed ring by ring with each shedding of the skin. All snakes are carnivorous, and, as a rule, take living prey only, a few feed habitually or occasionally on eggs. Many swallow their victims live, others first kill it by smothering it between the coils of their body. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.