Medicine: Poison for Pain

A Cuban leper, his arm scarred and painfully ulcerated, was bitten by a poisonous tropical spider. Strangely enough, he felt no ill effects, and the searing pain in his arm 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.

Best procedure when treating a victim of “intractable” pain, said Dr. Rutherford, is to send him to a hospital for a week. During the first half of the week he is given daily intramuscular venom injections of two or three cubic centimeters each. During this “saturation” period his pain is as agonizing as ever, and he usually needs heavy doses of morphine or other opiates. But within four or five days the venom seeps through his system and anesthetizes pain areas of his higher nerve centres. Gradually his pain dies away. After the first saturation period, the physician, by cautious experimenting, discovers exactly how large a maintenance dose the patient needs to carry him comfortably through his daily life. Patients should learn, said Dr. Rutherford, “to give themselves the injections, just as diabetic patients administer their own insulin . . . [and] to adjust their own dosage as their requirements demand.”

Dr. Rutherford tried cobra venom injections on 17 women, most of them victims of incurable cancer. Of the 17, eight felt completely relieved (several even gained weight, went back to work), seven told him their pain was greatly diminished. Only two had poor results. Other physicians, said Dr. Rutherford, are trying venom injections for relief of pain caused by chronic arthritis, heart disease, gangrene. Advantages over morphine: 1) venom lasts longer (morphine may wear off in three hours) ; 2) it is not habit-forming.