Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
31/740
- Publication/creation
- Boston : Ticknor and Fields, 1861.
- Physical description
- 3 unnumbered pages, 716 pages, 2 leaves of plates : illustrations ; 26 cm
- Contributors
-
Garratt, Alfred C. (Alfred Charles), 1813?-1891
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
- Notes
-
3d ed. has title: Medical electricity
Includes index and testimonials
- Type/technique
- Electronic books
- Subjects
-
Electrophysiology
Electrotherapeutics
- Attribution and usage
-
This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
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The image contains the following text:
It is presumed that every intelligent practitioner of medicine,
in these days, understands the fundamental Laws of Electricity;
but the author makes here a free but easy rehearsal of so much
of those laws and conditions, to which in its respective forms
Electricity is obedient while acting upon, or traversing through,
the different living tissues of the human organism, as will prove
a sufficient vade mecum, in its department, for ready reference
to the working practitioner. Certainly no conscientious and
high-minded person would be willing to attempt to employ this
powerful agent in any form on the human body, actively, as a
remedy, and much less as a trifling experiment, without first
being familiar at least with the outlines of its sources, its prop-
erties, its actions, and its results.
Sources of Electricity.
There are usually acknowledged three principal sources of
appreciable Electricity; namely, heat, mechanical friction, and
chemical action. While inanimate bodies are at rest, there is
no appreciable electricity to be found. The positive and nega-
tive exist in them in such proportions, that, although they do
not destroy each other, their effect is counterbalanced, and their
very existence is masked. Under the same distance and circum-
stance, the attractive power of the one is equal to the repulsive
power of the other. This natural rest of electricity must there-
fore be disturbed, in order to produce any appreciable existence
or action.
The earliest mention of electricity is supposed to have been
by the Ionian philosopher, Thales of Miletus, who discovered that
if a smooth piece of amber was rubbed with a dry cloth it at-
tracted various light bodies that were placed near it. Although
he was reckoned as one of the seven wise men of Greece, it is
also recorded of him, that from this phenomenon he supposed
that amber possessed a soul, and was thus nourished by the
attracted bodies. This was at an early day, however, for he died
in the ninety-sixth year of his age, about five hundred and
forty-eight years before the Christian era. Pliny the elder also