A Yantra For Scorpion Stings

By Ethel Merston

To my dispensary in the U.P. would come Scorpion stung patients in agony, but no medicine was efficacious in stopping the pain under hours. Left to itself it can continue for 24 hours or more.

The English engineer who was then building the Dufferin Bridge over-road, while visiting me one day was telling me stories of his career and, amongst them how, at a tiny local station on the line, the station master, an Indian, had taught him a yantra for scorpion stings so prevalent amongst the coolies working on the lines, who are often stung when they disturb scorpions while raising old sleepers. The yantra, which my friend had used for years, rarely failed to relieve the pain at once. It was just what I needed and I begged him to teach me the drawing and its use. He did so and it has never failed to cure a patient within two or three minutes of application. Only in one case, where the patient had been stung some twenty hours before coming to the dispensary and the poison had travelled right up the arm and down the back did the cure take some 15 minutes perhaps. The procedure is as follows :

1. First, where possible, tourniquet the stung limb well above the extreme point of the pain.

2. Next, take a pen (but not a gold-nibbed fountain pen) and on the skin of the patient, between the tourniquet and the extreme point of pain, draw the yantra in ink in one continuous movement, running A to B to C to A to D to C.

3. The line AD should, as it were, shoot at the point of pain and should be rather longer than AB or CA.

Having drawn the yantra, ask the patient where the pain is now. He will point to a spot nearer to the sting, the poison having retracted.

3. Draw the yantra again towards the point he mentions. Then again ask and again draw, and so on until the poison has retracted to the stung place. There one may have to do the yantra several times around the spot, always with, AD pointed inwards to the sting, before the pain goes entirely. If no very long time has elapsed between the sting and the time the patient has treatment, two or three drawings usually suffice on the limb and perhaps three or four at the sting before the' pain vanishes completely. In the case of the poor man who had delayed so long before coming and who could not be tourniqueted, he had yantras about every two inches up his back and down his arm to the sting in his hand; he was covered in pen and ink drawings before I had done with him!

Now, readers may ask, "How does this yantra work?" I don't know, no one has ever been able to explain it to me. Has it to do with the metal in the nib or chemical in the ink to which the poison is allergic and before which it retreats? Is it iron in the nib and the combination of it and the ink? Thinking it might be this, I tried one day with a rusty nail and ink, and it worked just as well - this is useful to know in a village where the stung patients are likely to be illiterate and have no pen or ink, or a city where steel nibs are obsolete.

I should much like some chemist to tell me what there is in scorpion poison that could be allergic to and retreat before a constituent of the nib or ink, but then, of course, any squiggle would work as well as the yantra, which it does not.

I myself was once stung by a scorpion I had picked up from my pillow thinking it to be a dead leaf, and though I could draw the yantra only very shakily with my left hand, it worked immediately, the pain left entirely and there were no after effects, not even soreness from the sting.

The yantra is indeed a useful remedy in this scorpion-infested land.