Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 157, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1913 — RIO EPILEPSY CURE [ARTICLE]

RIO EPILEPSY CURE

Rattlesnake Poison Used With Success by Doctors. Patients Given Up as Hopeless Benefited,. Though Injection Is PaMful in Some instances —Recovery - In Many Cases. New York.—Curing Epilepsy with hypodermic injections of rattlesnake venom is the achievement of Dr. Edward E. Hicks of this city, specialist in mental and nervous diseases and a prominent alienist, who for several months, it has just come to light, has been successfully experimenting at the Swedish hospital. Out of twenty cases he has treated for this malady only one has failed to respond, and yet there is not the slightest doubt in the minds of the physicians who have watched Doctor Hicks’ experiments that a permanent cure can be effected by injections of snake poison. Marvelous results attended his treatment from the very start, and of the twenty epileptics who submitted to the artificial snake bites only one suffered violent spasms after being injected with the venom. The other nineteen have had few recurrences, and within a year they will be absolutely cured. Doctor Hicks said, provided they receive the hypodermic injections of venom at regular Intervals. The discovery of snake venom as a cure for epilepsy was made by Dr. Ralph H. Spangler, a distinguished Philadelphia physician, who had bis attention called to an epileptic who had been free from attacks from the time he was bitten by a rattler. The patient had had epileptic fits for fifteen years, and when he was brought to Doctor Spangler he Jjgdn’t had one in two years, not since the time he was bitten. Doctor Spangler, who has been using the venom for chest and throat diseases in cases of tuberculosis, had several epileptic patients under his care at the time, and decided to give them Injections of the dried, glycerinized poison of the rattlesnake. The effect was gratifying and tended to show that, after all, cases that were regarded as absolutely hopeless could be cured, and only by the snake poison. Doctor Hicks, the first and only physician in Brooklyn to attempt the cure of epilepsy with the venom, was convinced of the Efficiency of the crotalin treatment, as* it is known in the medical world, when he made his first experiment at the Swedish hospital. The patient was a man who had suffered from epilepsy for years, and not long after receiving the first injection of snake poison the desired effect was noted. The severity of the attacks was modified, the intervals between the seizures were progressively lengthened, and a most desirable effect on the apprehensive mental state of the sufferer characteristic of epileptics was produced. Doctor Hicks, as did Doctor Spangler, discovered that the form of epilepsy most influenced by the venom was the so-called idiopathic or genuine epilepsy, for which there is no ascertainable cause. He found that the organic eplepsies, Including those forms arising from traumatic lesions of the skull or brain, or those forms associated with organic disease of the brain, such as tumors, did not yield to the venom treatment. Nor was there any influence on alooholic epilepsy, or any influence arising from uraemic conditions.