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

4. Among those births in which the pains commenced by day, the greater number were male children, and vice versa. 5. On an average, delivery was more protracted when the pains commenced by day than by night. 6. The preponderance of nocturnal over diurnal births is more striking in respect to children born dead, than in respect to those born living. 7. The maximum mortality occurs in the hours before noon, and the minimum mortality in the hours before midnight. 8. Individually regarded, the ratio of deaths from inflamma- tions, phthisis, and pulmonary hemorrhage is greater in the afternoon; from fevers and exanthemata, just before midnight; from cerebral apoplexy, during the day ; and from disease of the nervous system in general, in the hours which immediately fol- low midnight. Dr. Thomas Laycock, when remarking upon the great preva- lence, during last autumn, of diseases of the nervous system, makes the inquiry, whether the cause of this could arise from the nutritive functions having been less active.* Besides epigas- tric or hypochondriac neuralgia, he alludes to cases of quotidian intermittent tic-douloureux, or brow ague. In one case the pain- ful ramifications of the upper cervical nerves were traced out by the patient; in another, the pain was limited to the infra- orbital branch of the fifth ; and in other cases the paroxysms were accompanied by violent headache. Now, what is remark- able in these cases is this: — The greater proportion of them, indeed, all, I think, without an exception, began or ended about the same hour of the day. There were two paroxysmal hours in the case of the man who had been working in low grounds, and who had been affected for two or three weeks; the paroxysms began regularly at 4 o'clock P. M., and continued to 4 o'clock A. M. He then got ease, and went to sleep. And this was the case with several others. But the man with neuralgia of the supra-orbital nerve began to suffer at 8 or 9 o'clock A. M., and the paroxysm con- * Braithewaite's Retrospect, No. 15, p. 28.