Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
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body the blood is most essential, these, nothing less than true voltaic or animal electric actions and life force, must also have an influence. Furthermore, since it is self-evident that the circulation of the blood has thus to do, more or less, with every operation of the living body, I will only add that these experiments and considerations demonstrate the vast importance of employing artificial electricity, if possible, as a co-worker with nature's similar actions in our organisms as a rational, natural, and extensive remedial agent. " Hallerian Irritability " and Electro-physiological Experiments. Humboldt, in his Cosmos, has called astronomy the science of the universe without; but here, as a philosopher remarks, we are observing the no less suggestive and astonishing phenomenon through electro-physiology, viz., the science of the universe within. As we have already shown, the sum total of the entire apparatus of human life is but a due balance of forces acting and reacting as an elastic equilibrium which thus continues dur- ing health, but with an ever-varying and natural fluctuation, produced from impressions necessarily made from the world without, upon or through the peripheric nerve-pole, or else upon the inner nerve-pole from the same source, or else from ideas therein generated. Dr. Francis Glisson appears to have been the first to use the word " irritability " in a physiological sense.* But he ascribed an irritability proper to all the tissues of the human organism, even to the fluids and bones; and thus " motiva ftbrarum facul- tas,nisi irritabilis foret, vel perpetuo quiesceret vel perpetuo idem ageret. Actionum igitur earum varietates et differentia; earvn- dem irritabilitatem dare demonstrant." But the great Haller was the first to declare the vis museulosa insita;] i.e., a property inherent in the muscular fibre that is capable of being excited to contraction, independent of any immediate instru- * Tractatus de Ventriculo et Intestinis. Batavor, 1691, p. 168. t Elementa Physiologist?, vol. iv. lib. xi. Lusanna?, 1762.