Snakebite kit

Held in the history collection of the Western Australian Museum

DEATH ADDERS, DUGITES and tiger snakes were among the deadly characters the WA Museum’s first resident taxidermist, Herman Franz ‘Otto’ Lipfert, could have expected to meet working in the field. So it’s not surprising he went equipped with an early snakebite kit.

The kit he carried was distributed by Sydney-based medical equipment importer Ludwig Bruck. Lipfert, who joined the museum in 1894 and conducted collecting expeditions for four decades, donated his kit to the WA Museum when he retired after 1940.This vestige of 19th-century toxinology includes a patented poison sucker, a needle and syringe and two glass phials containing doses of the toxic alkaloid strychnine.

Snakebite therapy using strychnine – the same compound found today in products used to kill rats and other pests – gained prominence in Australia in 1889 when a Yackandandah doctor named Augustus Mueller unveiled this new treatment as an alternative to intravenous ammonia. (It was, of course, later replaced by the more credible antivenom approach.)

Lipfert’s kit does not have a record of ever having been used, which is fortunate because strychnine-based snakebite kits are now known to have done more harm than good. Quite apart from strychnine’s highly toxic effect on humans, modern studies show that the philosophy behind early snakebite kits – that venom can be extracted from a bite site – is, in fact, medically flawed.

The intended lifesaving devices often removed less than 1 per cent of the toxin of an envenomation.