Snake craft

A Mangshan expert continues his work with the viper that made him famous, Xing Yi reports.

He was the first to discover the Mangshan pit viper, an endangered venomous snake, and have it recognized as a unique species. He has been bitten nine times by the snakes, surviving each encounter but losing a finger after the last bite. Some people also call him "Dr Snake".

He is Chen Yuanhui, a grassroots expert on poisonous snakes.

Chen recently published his latest book, The Practical Treatment for Snakebites, which summarized his research on how to treat different cases, based on his past experience of healing more than 600 people - with a recovery rate of 99 percent.

In his Chinese-language autobiography Dance With Snakes: The Legend of Dr Snake at Mangshan, the former doctor at the Mangshan forestry administration's staff hospital tells his stories of protecting the endangered species since 1984, when he first encountered the deadly creature.

Chen was born in 1949, and when he was only 19, he went to work as a doctor in the mountainous Mangshan area in Central China's Hunan province.

Chen found the Mangshan pit viper in 1989 and together with Zhao Ermi, a herpetologist at the Chinese Academy of Science, had it formally identified as a unique species in 1990. That made Chen famous but also changed his life. Chen devoted himself to studying the endangered species at the administration's snake research center.

Because of the scarcity of the Mangshan pit viper, which has a global population of fewer than 500, the price for the snake quickly rose on the black market since it was identified.

To avoid diminishing the wild population, Chen decided to raise the rare creatures himself for research at home and for future release into nature.

That frightened his wife and daughter, and fueled conflict within the family. But after countless quarrels, Chen insisted on keeping the snakes.

His daughter continued to worry about him, and after her graduation from a medical school in 2001, she gave up a decent job in the city, returned to her parents' home and became her father's assistant.

That decision saved Chen's life.

In 2003, when Chen was releasing into nature a year-old specimen he had raised, it bit him in the middle finger.

Chen underestimated the venom of the small snake and insisted on taking a photo of the wound before getting treatment. But after a few minutes, he felt dizzy and lost consciousness.

His daughter went on squeezing out the venom, and kept applying the herbal formula created by Chen on the wounded finger.

After three days in a state of unconsciousness, Chen finally awoke. But due to a serious infection, the "dead" finger had to be amputated.

To many people's surprise, Chen continued his research after coming back from death's door.

"My wife used to call me a 'cold-blooded animal, just like the snakes'," he recalls, his eyes welling up at the thought of the woman, who passed away in 2006 when Chen was out on a field trip in the mountains.

"Now I don't worry about death," says Chen, "because I have died many times."

Contact the writer at xingyi@chinadaily.com.cn