Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
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already telegraphing nations with a harmony of intelligence, besides performing every day a thousand other useful works, must also be brought to the aid of our enfeebled bodies, or de- ranged nervo-telegraph systems, to vivify, to restore communi- cation, to clear them of their debris, and enable them again to regulate their more normal and constantly-renewing supplies. We find also the general principle, that every disturbance im- pressed upon a body — and this peculiarly applies to the living- human body — from which arises any change, or even the slight- est disturbance in the state of its molecular equilibrium in any department, is strictly accompanied by a like production of elec- tricity, which is manifested more or less according to the phys- ical and chemical condition of the body so disturbed. To sum up, then, we are able to show a rigorous principle that is now fairly demonstrated, viz., that not only friction and heat, but also every sort of mechanical and chemical action which disturbs the minutest particles of the human organism, becomes the producer of electricity in that body ; which, in the living body, we see manifested through the nervous media — first, for healthy function; second, for diseased action. In health, and within certain bounds, electricity does not accumulate in the body, nor yet does it greatly diminish, as occurs in disease, because the two electricities for the most part tend to recompose to a balance, and so become quiet; yet at the same time the same process is continually succeeding. Indeed, we are enabled to prove by direct and conclusive test, as by the aid of a sensitive galvanom- eter multiplier, that every minutest chemical action gives rise to an electric current. This action may be that of a liquid upon a solid, or upon two solids, or of two liquids upon each other, or of a gas in connection with any of these, under certain condi- tions, or it may be that peculiar action which characterizes all the phenomena of slow or rapid combustion. But all this will be more clearly illustrated in Electro-physiology.