Medicine: Rx for Snake Bite

When he was a boy in Houston, Miss. (pop. 1,700), Van Buren Philpot Jr. picked up a lot of local lore about snakes. He heard that many harmless snakes are immune to bites from rattlers and moccasins, that the nonpoisonous king snakes often eat venomous snakes. When he entered Tulane Medical School in the fall of 1946, Philpot felt that there was still a lot to be learned about snakebite poisoning, and made up his mind to fill in some of the gaps himself.

Philpot bought a dozen king snakes and, with the help of his pharmacology professor, Dr. Ralph G. Smith, set about extracting a serum which would be harmless in itself and still neutralize the venom of rattlers and moccasins. The first difficulty was to get enough blood out of a king snake. Eventually, Philpot hit upon the simple idea of cutting off the snakes’ tails. In this way, he got as much as 40 cc of blood from a five-foot snake and 20 cc or more of serum from the blood.

Instead of exposing himself to deadly snakes to test the serum, Philpot bought rattlesnake and moccasin venom in powdered form. Then he went to work on mice. He found that a mouse could be injected with 2½ to 3½times the lethal dose of viper venom, and still survive if promptly given an injection of king snake serum. Better yet, he found that his king snake extract was three to four times more effective than a commercial preparation made, by a far more difficult process, from the blood of venom-injected horses.

Dr. Philpot, now 27 and beginning an internship at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, and Dr. Smith reported the findings in the current Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. They did not expect the work to found a major business in snakebite cures: the U.S. has only about 2,000 cases of snake bite a year. But there seemed to be no reason why men, as well as mice, should not benefit from the king snake’s natural immunity.