Blue Death

Human proof of an effective antidote for cyanide poisoning was working as an orderly in a San Francisco county hospital last week. Cuthbert Reiveley, 24, onetime medical student at the University of Michigan, drank about 15 grains of potassium of cyanide in a tumbler half full of water, at once told some friends, fell unconscious. They rushed him to an emergency hospital where Dr. Raymund Joseph Millzner was presiding. Dr. Millzner judged from Cuthbert Reiveley's blue lips and fingernails what had happened, washed out the patient's stomach with a solution of baking soda. Sure enough, the bellywash smelled like peach kernels, the distinctive odor of cyanide.

Thereupon Dr. Millzner did what theretofore' had never been done to a human being. He injected 50 c.c. of a sterile aqueous 1% solution of methylene blue into one of Cuthbert Reiveley's veins. In five minutes the moribund young man revived. Ten minutes later he wrote down, at Dr. Millzner's suggestion, his experiences: "There wasn't any sensation other than a numbness starting at the extremities and gradually, without pain, spreading. The sensation was really quite pleasant--no pain and no muscular rigidity in going under." After he received the methylene blue injection "there was just a sensation of floating."

Methylene blue is a common dye in the textile industry. Biologists use it to stain various microbes. Physicians find the substance useful in malaria, neuralgia and urogenital infections. Dr. Millzner's use of methylene blue followed first aid instructions prepared this autumn by Pharmacologists Paul John Hanzlik (Stanford University) & Chauncey Depew Leake (University of California). Cyanides poison the body cells, make them incapable of taking life-essential oxygen from the blood. In some unknown way methylene blue detoxifies the cells, enables them to breathe again.*

* Sodium thiosulphate, a drug used externally for ringworm, internally to reduce blood pressure, seems to have similar power. In Buenos Aires last year Dr. A. Buzzo saved four cyanide cases by intravenous injections of sodium thiosulphate and adrenalin.

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