Glennis Middleton, a councillor from Forfar, Angus, was not wearing her glasses when she reached for a drink after some strenuous home decorating, picked up the wrong bottle and drank three mouthfuls of what properly belonged inside her car radiator.

There was nothing on the bottle to label the antifreeze as potentially lethal. But Mrs Middleton’s daughter telephoned the family GP, who recommended going to hospital. Doctors administered two drams of whisky, followed by a dram every hour through the night as they monitored the level of antifreeze in her blood.

Mrs Middleton, 51, who dislikes whisky almost as much as antifreeze, had to hold her nose and shut her eyes to force down her life-saving medicine.

Vodka or gin would have worked equally well but, as a patriotic Scot, she chose the vin de pays.

Dr Shobhan Thakore, of Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, explained that the two forms of alcohol in antifreeze — ethylene glycol and methanol — become toxic when metabolised by an enzyme in the liver, causing kidney failure, seizures or blindness.

But when ordinary alcohol is administered, the enzyme is diverted to metabolise the new toxins, allowing the potentially damaging products to be flushed out through the kidneys before they can cause damage.

“The enzyme system is so busy dealing with the whisky that its ability to turn the antifreeze toxic is inhibited; it is then eliminated by the kidneys,” Dr Thakore said.

Even 100ml of antifreeze can be fatal, but doctors stress that the antidote must be medically supervised. Patients are then likely to suffer little more than a hangover.

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