Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
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into its many cutaneous and muscular branches. The pain then darts along to the middle of the inner thigh, or to the inside of the knee, or it may trace along the internal saphenus nerve, which is the main continuation of the anterior crural, down the inner side of the leg to the inner ankle. Those minute branches of this nerve that are distributed about the lower edge of the patella were the seat of most excruciating attacks of neuralgia for years, in a gentleman of eminence in Cambridge, whom the author cured more than a year ago by electro-magnetic currents. The morbid action in this case was first set up by hitting the knee against the steps of a railway car. In another case, a young lady fell up stairs, and struck the knee about two inches above the patella, which hurt her somewhat at the time, but it was soon forgotten. For several years past she has been moro or less lame, and subject to paroxysms of most excruciating pain in a point just below that knee, which extended up to Pou- part's ligament, and the anterior crest of the ilium. She is now entirely free from lameness, nor has she the least pain in the knee even after severe walks; but there is evidently a rheumatic diathesis, and she now and then feels the grumbling pains of it on vicissitudes of weather, but not at the knee. Both Galvanic and Faradaic currents were employed, and she received some nine sittings in all, with medical treatment. (See p. 476, B.) True neuralgia of the muscles may be known from the rheu- matic affection of the muscles, because in the former the pains are very much more acute, and recur in frequent paroxysms but there is not the dull ache or numb sensation in the interval of neuralgia that there is often in a rheumatism of the muscles After the pain ceases, if it is neuralgia, there is great weak- ness, or even partial palsy, of the muscle. It may often be sus^ pecteel as attending some insidious organic disease of the cord or brain, as it does sometimes; and apoplexy or paralysis may sooner or later, attack the patient. So, indeed, do I always sus- pect even neuralgic pains that are chronic, ivhich proceed from the cervical or the brachial plexus, the recurring paroxysms in- volving the shoulder or upper arm. And this may prove more generally true of all severe and long recurring neuralgias,