Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
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electricity, — then it is no wonder that plants, fishes, birds, beasts, and men, placed over such an electrified girdle of the globe, should suffer, each accord- ing to their susceptibility and organization, and to the extent or continuance of oscillating currents. A hoop, or circumference, broader than the peninsula of India, conveying long-continued electric concussions and steam-electricity under land and water, will carry the disturbing range to eighty, ninety, or one hundred degrees, every series pointing to different series of disorders. 46. That there is reason to believe, a disturbed cincture arrives and retires with the revolutions of this planet. Perhaps the time may come, when the dreaded advent of these revolving sources of disturbance may be predicted by calculation, as the march of the cholera was estimated, in 1832, at the rate of about ninety miles per month. It is, therefore, when the excited air above, and the exhausted earth below, attract and repel long interchanges of galvanic emanations, that greater or more dangerous pathological degrees of disturb- ance ensue, fit to derange the scale to the point of such vast loss of balance as to indicate the exciting causes of typhus fever, sweating sickness, bubo plague, yellow fever, black vomit, and black death. 47. Within and around our cities and towns we contrive the most exten- sive batteries for extricating galvanism ; we establish currents and counter currents of the electric [fluid], and of its vehicles; viz., the noisome gases, escaping up our pipes and drains. These foul airs rush up into our apart- ments, conducted by walls and floors, and carrying up currents of overpowering galvanic emanations. The walls and atmosphere of the rooms, being, in gen- eral, positively charged, induce negative passes from the human bodies within their range, and from the moist earth below attracting the electricity of the persons present, if of an opposite, and repelling it if of the same kind. 48. The vast number of chemical trials which I conducted in these marshy valleys, all demonstrated, as far as can be proved by negative evidence, that there is no such peculiar morbific agent (per se) as that which is understood by the name of marsh miasm, or paludial malaria. In most of these experiments, animal exhalations, supposed putrine, and organic remains, were traceable, with more or less of ammonia, in all the gases evolving in low fens or clay soils. But ammonia and all other impregnations were found in most regions of the air in Ireland, England, France, and Italy, where no epidemic at the time prevailed. 49. These results led to the conclusions which were afterwards confirmed by more extended researches in Italy. I found that when human beings recline upon moist ground, or on beds placed upon it, their natural, latent, or neutral electricity is disturbed or decomposed by the extensive surface of the body exposed to telluric attraction and repulsion of galvanic currents, conducted by the fatal chains of damp walls or floors, stagnant drains, filthy beds, or soiled clothing. 50. In the places described, extensive evaporation, and energetic chemical action during the day, charged the atmosphere of the place with positive gal-