Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
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ical world, became more fashionable. He concluded that elec- tricity was an exciting remedy; that it increases the vital powers; that it swells or plumps those diseased parts of the body which are touched by it; that it excites perspiration, and even salivation, (if not other secretions,) which become very profuse sometimes if the electricity be strong. He there gives, as his experience, that by a prudent use of electricity, patients were certainly relieved of obstinate pains ; that the normal heat is restored in parts which had been cold even for years ; that patients suffering from constipation sometimes experience abun- dant evacuations ; that muscular wasting and paralysis, as well as cedema, are cured; that nerves are quieted, and a disposition to sleep is usually induced by electricity. In a few years after, M. Cavallo published all that was known on the subject up to his time, in his " Theory and Practice of Medical Electricity," which contains numerous valuable observations. He recom- mended to the profession the more frequent resort to the elec- trical machine, in their cases of paralysis, partial amaurosis, deaf- ness, chorea, and epilepsy, and for resuscitating persons after being nearly drowned or suffocated. The next considerable work on the remedial uses of static electricity appeared in 1802, although that was past the time of the galvanic and voltaic discoveries, and in connection with which latter the whole world of letters was flooded with piles and scraps of news or gossip relating to it, coming through every channel. This work was put forth by M. Sigaud de la Fond, on " Medical Electricity," which was as sweeping as our modern " Electropathy; " for, according to that work, there is scarcely a disease known in pathological anatomy that could not have been cured by those elaborately described methods which he laid down for its use. According to him, there were seven dif- ferent methods of applying the electricity of the electrical ma- chine, viz., by an electrical air bath, by drawing sparks, by giving sparks, by friction, by insufflation, by exhaustion, and by com- motion. There arc some other less important works found, that were published in the latter part of the last century, upon this branch