Part 55

On the other hand, Dr. Murray-Aaron records serious symptoms following two bites upon the hand by a large female trapdoor tarantula; pain comparable to that of the worst earache, involuntary twitching of arms, legs, lips, and tongue, great swelling and discoloration of the hand and forearm, and considerable suffering for four days, with occasionally recurrent pains for a month. This, however, was in Haiti. And even there, he believes, death never follows tarantula bite unless the subject is in a depleted state of resistance from blood-disease or other cause.

Under the heading "Fatal Spider Bite" there is a considerable and interesting newspaper bibliography. The details do not analyze well. Often the name of the supposed victim doesn't appear; and where names and specifications are given, the evidence is hardly sufficient, as a rule, to convict the insect of any crime more serious than mayhem. For example, a young woman in Brooklyn awoke one morning to find a swollen spot on her body. On the bed was (according to allegation) a spider. Some ten days later she died. For a long period she had been in ill health. Yet the death was credited to the spider, though specific symptoms of venomous poisoning were lacking.

The instance of a young woman in an Eastern state is significant. Thrusting her foot into an old slipper, she felt a sharp jab upon the point of her index digit. Upon hasty removal of the footgear, she saw, or supposed she saw, a large and ferocious spider dart forth. This, to her mind, was evidence both conclusive and damning. Seizing upon the carving knife, she promptly cut off her perfectly good toe, bound up the wound, and sent for the doctor, thereby blossoming out in next day's print as a "Heroine who had Saved her own life by her Marvelous Presence of Mind." The thoughtful will wonder, however, whether the lady wouldn't have got at the real root of the matter by cutting off her head instead of her toe.

SPIDER HYSTERIA

Imagination and terror undoubtedly account for certain general symptoms in this class of injury. Colonel Nicholas Pike, a competent observer, records a case of a man slapping his hand down upon a window sill and feeling a lively stab in the palm. At the same moment a small spider ran across the back of his fingers and was captured. There was a distinct puncture in the hand. Here, then, was a definite case, where the wound and the insect were both in evidence. But examination of the arachnid's fangs satisfied Colonel Pike that they were far too small and weak to penetrate the tough skin where the wound was. Meantime the victim exhibited the classic symptoms of venomous poisoning: numbness, nausea, chills, and threatened collapse. A physician, being summoned, examined both the victim and the accused, and took Colonel Pike's view that the spider was innocent. The man was wrathful, with the indignation of terror. He said he guessed he knew whether he was bitten or not, and that the physician's business was to eschew idle speculations and go ahead and save his life if it wasn't already too late. Thereupon the doctor opened up the wound and extracted a section of a fine needle. The other half was found sticking in the window sill where a careless seamstress had fixed it. The spider had been a fortuitous arrival. The man made one of the quickest recoveries recorded.

THE "RED-SPOT"--DANGEROUS

Strangely enough, the one really dangerous spider on the American continent is small, obscure, and practically unknown to popular or journalistic hysteria. Latrodectus mactans is its scientific name. It is about the size of a large pea, black with a red spot on the back--a useful danger signal--and spins a small web in outhouses or around wood-piles. So far as is known, its poison is the most virulent and powerful, drop for drop, secreted by any living creature. Cobra virus, in the minute quantity which the Latrodectus's glands contain, would probably have no appreciable effect upon man; whereas the tiny spider's venom, in the volume injected by the cobra's stroke, would slay a herd of elephants. Were this little-known crawler as large as the common black hunting spider of our gardens and lawns, its bite would be almost invariably fatal. Happily, the "red-spot's" fangs, being small and weak, can with difficulty penetrate the skin, and are able to inject venom in dangerous quantity only when the bite is inflicted upon some tender-skinned portion of the body. Nevertheless, fatalities consequent upon the bite of this insect are sufficiently well attested to take rank as established scientific facts.

One of the most detailed comes from an intelligent farmer of Greensboro, North Carolina. A workman in his employ, while hauling wood, brushed at something crawling upon his neck and felt a sharp, stinging sensation. He found a small, black spider with a red spot. This was at 8.30 A.M. Presently, ten small white pimples appeared about the bitten spot, though no puncture was visible and there was no swelling. The pain soon passed, but returned in three hours and became general, finally settling in the abdomen and producing violent cramps. At one o'clock the man had a spasmodic attack. Two hours later he had so far recovered as to be able to go back to work, for an hour. Then the spasms took him again; he sank into coma, and died between ten and eleven o'clock that evening, about fourteen hours after the bite. At no time were there local symptoms or swelling, other than the slight eruption, but the neck, left arm, and breast are reported as having assumed a stonelike hardness.

The same farmer had seen, three years previous, a negro who had been bitten upon the ankle by a "red-spot" and who suffered from diminishingly severe spasmodic attacks for three weeks. The white pimples appeared in this case also. The negro recovered, but the eruption reappeared for years thereafter whenever he was overheated.

Recoveries from Latrodectus bite are much more common, in the records, than deaths. Dr. Corson, of Savannah, Georgia, reports six cases, characterized by agonizing pains, spasmodic contractions like those of tetanus, and grave general symptoms. All recovered. From Anaheim, California, a fatal case is reported by Dr. Bickford, death occurring twenty hours after the bite. William A. Ball, of San Bernardino, California, gives a vivid account of his sensations after being bitten on the groin by a red-spotted spider, the data being attested by his physician. Shortly after being bitten, he began to suffer great agony, with convulsive contractions of the muscles.

"The pains in my hip-joints, chest, and thighs grew rapidly more violent, until it seemed that the bones in these parts of my body were being crushed to fragments." He was seriously ill for ten days.

WORSE TEXAN THE "DEADLY" COPPERHEAD

It may be that only under certain uncomprehended conditions is the venom of the Latrodectus effective. Inoculation of guinea pigs with the poison has been without any resultant symptoms. Scientific experimenters have suffered themselves to be bitten and have experienced no ill effects. The foreign cousins of the American species, however, have as evil a repute as the "mactans." The "katipo," found in sedges on the beach of New Zealand, is dreaded by the Maoris, who traditionally refuse to sleep nearer than half a stone's throw from the water, that being the extent of range of the spider. The Latrodecti of Corsica, Algeria, and France are infamous in the lore of the country folk, which fact must be regarded as strongly evidential, when their insignificant appearance is taken into account.

Only in America is there no popular fear of this really formidable little creature. Yet it is found in almost every part of the United States, though by no means one of the commoner spiders. In the past five years I have seen two specimens at my country place in central New York, and have heard of a dozen others. If people understood generally that this rather ornamental insect is both more perilous to life and health, and rather more prone to attack human beings, than the superstitiously dreaded "deadly" copperhead, there would probably be a heavy mortality in the Latrodectus family at the hands of energetic house-cleaners.

THE RISE OF THE KISSING-BUG

Years ago the United States Bureau of Entomology received from an exasperated clergyman in Georgia a dead insect, enclosed in this note:

"Prof. Riley: What is this devil? He sailed down on my hedge. I took hold of his lone front leg, and as quick as lightning he speared me under my thumb nail and I dropped him. My thumb and whole arm are still paining me . . . "

The miscreant was a fine specimen of Reduvius personatus, the cone-nosed blood-sucker, soon thereafter to achieve heights of newspaper notoriety together with its cousin, Melanolestes picipes, as the "kissing-bug." How many persons died (in type) from kissing-bug bites in the year of enlightened civilization, 1899, will never be known. But from far and near, from California and Connecticut and the Carolinas, from Minnesota and Maryland and Maine, came startling reports of this hitherto unfamed creature's depredations upon the human countenance. Thereby the spider family was relieved of much unmerited odium, for it is more than suspected by entomologists that a large proportion of so-called spider bites are really the work of the more vicious but less formidable-appearing kissing-bug, as is often evidenced by the nature of the puncture.

The kissing-bug is about half an inch in length, flat-backed, shaped in geometrically regular angles, and armed with a large, hard beak. It is this beak which does the damage, for the kissing-bug is a fighter and will risk a prod at anything that gives it cause of offense. Testimony is not lacking that it sometimes punctures the human epidermis with a view to obtaining blood at first hand instead of from its natural prey.

But the curious feature of the kissing-bug's bite is its after effect. Neither the southern Reduvius nor the northern Melanolestes possesses any venom apparatus. Now, an insect without fangs (or sting), duct, and poison gland, can no more envenom the object of its attack than a fish can kick a man to death. Yet we find such authorities as Dr. L. O. Howard, the United States Entomologist, Professor Le Conte, Mr. Charles Drury, of Cincinnati, and others, including a mass of medical witnesses, declaring from first-hand observation that the kissing-bug bite causes much swelling and severe pain. Le Conte, indeed, compares the effect to snake bite, and states that people are seriously affected for a week. A case is recorded from Holland, South Carolina, where there were vomiting and marked weakness. Mr. Schwartz, an expert of the Bureau of Entomology at Washington, was bitten twice upon the hand and testifies to the painful effects. In 1899, when the species was very common in Washington, the Emergency Hospital had a long list of patients who appeared on the records under the heading, "Insect Bite."

THE DECLINE OF THE KISSING-BUG

Thus was started the general "scare," a reporter with a keen nose for news having made a legitimate "sensation" from the repeated entries on the hospital roster. From Washington it spread over the country, and became the topic of the day, until any insect bite or sting--mosquito, hornet, bedbug, or whatnot--was magnified by the hysteria of the patient and the credulousness of the public into a "dangerous" instance of kissing-bug poisoning. Reports of fatal cases, however, invariably proved to be canards.

For explanation of the marked local symptoms resultant upon attack by the insect, science has been hard put to it. The general symptoms, observed in a few cases, where violent, may probably be ascribed to shock and nervousness. But the marked swelling and pain cannot be thus dismissed. Medical men believe that the insect, in its various prowlings for food, thrusts its exploring beak into decaying animal and vegetable matter and thus, in a sense, so poisons it that when it comes into contact with human blood, a rapid local infection is set up--not through any specific poison, as in spider bite or bee sting, but by the agency of the putrefactive germs collected on the weapon.

Not the least interesting phase of the kissing-bug scare is the rapidity and completeness of its decadence. It is but ten years ago that the newspapers rang with it; that victims of the bite, in every city, were fleeing, white-faced and racked with forebodings, to doctor or hospital. To-day, both the Melanolestes and the "conenose" are abroad in the land. Doubtless, upon provocation, they are "spearing" others as they speared the outraged clergyman. But that's all. The bepunctured ones do not seek the consolations of medical or journalistic attention. They put a little wet mud or peroxide on the place and let it go at that. Exit another bogy!

OUR REAL POISON PERIL

One venomous creature there is in this country which may justly be termed a public peril, in the widest sense. Proportionately to population, more victims fall to it yearly in the United States than to the dreaded cobra in India. Some twelve thousand Americans are killed every year by its bite. Three hundred thousand more are made seriously ill from the after effects. Unfortunately, the virus works so slowly that alarm is stilled. The victims do not sicken at once. The bite is forgotten; but ten days or two weeks after, the subject falls into a fever. His blood is poisoned within him. Eventually, in extreme cases, he becomes delirious, succumbs to a stupor, and dies.

Yet, because there is nothing horrific to the sensation-loving imagination in the malaria-bearing mosquito, public inertia or ignorance tolerates it with a grin and permits it to breed in city and country alike throughout the length and breadth of the nation. Compared with it, as a real menace, all the combined brood of snakes, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, and other pet bugaboos of our childish romanticism are utterly negligible; are as figment to reality, as shadow to substance. It is perhaps characteristic of our wryly humorous American temperament that we should have invested the unimportant danger with all the shuddering attributes of horror, and have made of the real peril a joke to be perennially hailed with laughter in a thousand thoughtless prints.

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4