Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
277/740

scrofula, we see the greatest deviation of normal cell-life, while there is hut very little nervous phenomena. In these maladies we find extensive organic disease, yet little pain, little impair- ment of motion or of sensation, when compared with the same amount of change in the electro-nervous affections, as, for in- stance, rheumatism. Cancer, like scrofula and inflammation, consists of abnormal organic cell; which, however, differs from both tubercle and pus in its physical character. Syphilis is also a malady of abnormal organic cell; the virus of which influences the entire cell-life of all that individual organism. Now, all these and other organic diseases appear to mo, to pro- scribe any sort of use of, or hope from the use of any form of electricity employed as a therapeutic agent. Professor Bonnet, of Edinburgh, says, " Every known fact convinces me, — and the progress of science only adds strength to my convictions,— that we must ascribe the ultimate cause of in- flammation to a degenerate state, arising from a derangement of those forces which regulate the nutritive powers of the living economy," and that the only correct definition of inflammation itself is, " an exudation of the normal liquor sanguinis." It is in vain that physiologists seek in the alterations of the vessels on the one hand, or in the morbid changes in the blood on the other, for the primary cause of this important condition. Facts prove that both are more or less affected; and they also show that neither the one change nor the other, nor yet the two combined, constitute inflammation. The vital wm'o-electric properties of the tissues (understanding by these the little known and less defined conditions necessary for carrying on the nutritive process) are in all such cases deranged; and such alteration is the very cause of the changes which have been referred to, and not the effect. The increased heat manifested after certain manipulations with electric currents on the living skin and flesh is not simply due to a greater afflux of blood to the vessels of the part so treated ; for it is proved, that those are not expanded by electro- magnetic currents, certainly, if applied directly over the mus- cles, but are then rather constricted for the time, and therefore