“The Indian took, from a bottle which contained several of them, a tooth of the Grage (Lachesis atrox), an extremely poisonous snake, and with it made upon my instep three incisions about 3 centimetres in breadth. He allowed the wounds to bleed for a minute. I then experienced a fainting sensation, and large drops of sweat rolled from my forehead. The wounds were next rubbed with a blackish powder. I have since learnt that this powder was composed of the liver and gall of the animal, dried in the sun and pounded up with the poison-glands. The blood immediately ceased to flow. The Indian chewed some leaves of a tree mixed with this powder, and, applying his lips to the sore, injected into it as much saliva as he could, making an effort as though to inflate a balloon. This completed the operation.
“Since then I have been bitten seven times by different species of very dangerous snakes, such as the Grage, coral-snake, &c., and have never even had an attack of fever. The Galibi, Boni, and Emerillon Indians, the Bosse negroes, and all the aboriginal natives of Guiana employ the same method of procedure. They even pretend that this kind of vaccination is transmissible to their offspring, and that the hereditary immunity is maintained through several generations.”
Some years ago Mons. d’Abbadie communicated to the Académie des Sciences[92] a note from Colonel Serpa Pinto relating to another method of vaccination employed by the natives of Mozambique, which the Colonel himself consented to undergo.
“I was vaccinated,” writes Colonel Serpa Pinto, “at Inhambane (on the East Coast of Africa), among the Vatuas. These people extract the poison of a snake which is known in Portuguese as the Alcatifa (i.e., carpet), and is so called on account of the variegated colour of its skin, which resembles a carpet. I am not acquainted with the means employed in order to obtain the poison, which is mixed with vegetable substances, and forms with the latter a dark brown viscid paste.
“Two parallel incisions, 5 millimetres in length, are made in the skin, and into these is introduced the paste containing the poison. These incisions are made on the arms, near the junction of the radius and ulna with the carpal bones, on the back of the hand, on the back, on the shoulder-blades, and on the feet, near the great toes. After the operation the natives exact an oath that the vaccinated one will never kill a poisonous snake, because they say that henceforth the snake is his intimate friend, and they throw upon him an Alcatifa snake, which does not bite him.
“After undergoing this operation my whole body was swollen up for a week, and I underwent every possible kind of suffering.
“I have never been bitten by any snake, and cannot vouch for the infallibility of this remedy. The Vatuas do so, however, and they never kill a snake.
“A short time after having been vaccinated, I was stung, when in the Seychelle Islands, by a scorpion, which did me no harm. Ten years later, at the time of my journey across Africa, I was stung by another scorpion which hurt me dreadfully, and for a week I thought that I was going to die or lose my arm.”
Mystification and superstitious ideas play, as we see, a very great part in this preventive treatment, which is undergone by the natives of certain countries and snake-catchers or charmers. But it is not very surprising that, thanks to successive and repeated inoculations, a man can succeed in acquiring sufficient immunity to preserve himself from snake-bites.
In ancient times it was even pretended that it was possible for this immunity to be transmitted in certain cases by heredity, and thus we can understand how the profession of snake-charmer was hereditary in certain native families in India or Egypt.