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

the 7th, the machine remained quite dumb. This new decrease of the electric fluid has perfectly accorded, as is only too well known, with the renewed violence of the cholera ; for my part, I was not more alarmed than astonished; my conviction was complete. I saw only the consequence of the fact already sup- posed. It may be imagined with what anxiety, in these mo- ments of the crisis, I consulted the machine, the sad and faithful interpreter of a great calamity. At last, on the morning of the 8th, some feeble sparks reappeared, and from hour to hour elec- tric intensity increased. I felt with joy that the vivifying fluid was returning in the atmosphere. Towards evening a storm announced at Paris that the electricity had reentered its domain; to my eyes it was the cholera disappearing with the cause which produced it. The next day (Saturday the 9th) I continued my observations: the machine then, at the least touch, rendered with facility most lively sparks. Now, it is stated that in the six days following the 8th of June, the mortality in Paris fell regularly from GG7 to 355. Another very curious circumstance is related by Dr. Kidd, of Limerick, Ireland, in the Medical Times of July of that year. While the epidemic was raging in that city, a large magnet, capable of sustaining seventy pounds, was watched daily. No variation took place in it. But on the appearance of the dis- ease in Dublin, — one hundred miles east of Limerick, — the cholera being quite gone from the latter place, the magnet now suddenly lost nearly all its power. Sir James Murray, M. D., who adopts Dr. Benjamin Frank- lin's theory of electricity, published a series of extensive inves- tigations and experiments made by him, or under his auspices, some years since,* from which we make the following abstract from his own conclusions, and mostly in his own words: — 1. I consider, he says, that the exciting cause of epidemics, which is called malaria, is not " bad air " at all, as the name implies, but the result of dis- turbed electricity. 2. That marsh miasms, gases, or effluvia of vegeto-animal matters, or putrid emanations, are not, as is commonly supposed, the exciting causes of agues, or other diseases called malarious. * These views are not wholly adopted by the author.