Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
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controlled by muscular influence. We applied the galvanic test as before, using the mildest force which would produce an ob- vious effect. Now, the unaffected limb was first and most af- fected by the galvanism! " In these two cases we have the marked forms of cerebral and spinal paralysis respectively; in the first we observe a very marked tonus, (contraction ;) in the second, abolition of tonus, (flaccidity;) in the first, we have augmented, in the second, diminished, irritability of the ultimate nerves and muscular fibre. In the first, too, there was agitation of the arm on any emotion ; in the second, none. I had no satisfactory mode of testing the existence or absence of reflex action. " The physiologist, and now-, I think, the practitioner, also, will see the value of these phenomena to medical science, and bring their translation into diagnosis. " In hemiplegia, the seat of emotion, the source of tonus, and the source of irritability, are left; in spinal paralysis, the seat of emotion, the source of the tone of the muscles, and of the irritability of the muscular fibre, are removed. It must be re- membered that in both cases the muscular mass was equally atrophied. What are the obvious physiological inferences from these facts, and what are their practical advantages in a diag- nostic point of view ? I leave the replies to these questions to my readers, observing, that the first must be diametrically opposed to the opinions recently advocated by the late Dr. J. Reid, by Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Todd, &c. The cases themselves, with many others, have all been witnessed by others so frequently, and so carefully, that they may, I believe, be received as accurately as- certained facts, from which equally cautious inferences may be fearlessly drawn. Are not these inferences — first, that the cere- brum is the seat of volition; second, that a lower portion of the encephalon [the medulla oblongata] is the seat of emotion; third, that the medulla spinalis [spinal cord] is the seat or source of tone or tonicity in the muscular system; and fourth, of the irritability of the muscular fibre ; and fifth, that the two last are not dependent on nutrition merely ? " I may here add that the cause of cerebral paralysis is, chiefly,