Poison Arrow Drug.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20653, 29 June 1935, Page 10

Poison Arrow Drug.

Experiment as Last Resort Fails. LONDON, May IS. T,AST DECEMBER the newspapers announced that Dr Robert George Ranyard West, of the Oxford University Department of Pharmacology, was waiting by the side of his telephone for news of a case of lockjaw in which little hope was held of the patient’s recovery. He was ready to leave at once by motorcar to any such case within a hundred miles of Oxford. For years Dr West had studied tetanus, or lockjaw, the rapidly developing disease which, though described as early as 400 B.C. by Hippocrates, was not traced to a bacillus until 1889. Dr West, aided by chemists, produced a drug called curarine, made from the deadly poison called curare, used by South American Indians for their blowpipes. Then he waited for a case where he could use the treatment. Yesterday Dr West entered in his casebook the record of an apparent failure. He had rushed Jjo St Thomas’ Hospital in London with a supply of curarine to attempt to save the life of William James Bugby, a twenty-seven-year-old plumber’s assistant, of Mitcham. Bugby contracted tetanus after wounding his foot with a nail while at work on a housing estate. Dr West’s preparation, it was stated at the inquest, in Camberwell, yesterday, had been administered as a last resort. The object was to control the spasms of the muscles in order to give anti-tetanus serum a chance to act. Lockjaw victims usually die in the course of muscular spasms. Dr West’s idea is that if the muscles can be paralysed the spasms will be prevented. The last-resort experiment failed. Bugby died.