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

neously through a circuit of many persons, producing a manifest shock in them all. 32. That we observe, by experiment, how various is the quantity of elec- tricity required to charge different persons. The amount is shown by obtaining sparks of the same size, from separate individuals, when equally insulated. Even their capacities for electricity, and their conducting powers, vary consid- erably. It is little wonder, then, that an endless diversity prevails in the ailments and sensations of persons who are so sensibly affected by what they call the state of the weather, damp, or the change of winds. These three enemies are supposed to be the actual perpetrators of injuries, which of them- selves they have not the power to inflict. They are only vehicles of the dis- turber ; they are not the real exciting cause ; they only conduct it. They convey through the cold cottages of the poor, and the warm mansion of the rich, that invisible, subtile, disturbing agent, galvanism, which speedily probes and searches the bones, muscles, joints, and inmost organs of invalids, deranges the nervous functions, affects the animal spirits, and acts magnetically on the protoxide of iron in the veins. 33. Nature employs but few means to accomplish many ends. Electricity can produce thousands of effects ; it is heat, light, galvanism, magnetism, and chemical action ; or it is convertible into them. Its modifications constitute, in my opinion, that universal ether film which encircles all particles of matter, and preserves, by its powers of attraction and repulsion, the ultimate mole- cules of all organized bodies in their natural, relative connection and condition. 34. That, as a definite proportion of electricity belongs, and is peculiar to every thing, and as a natural quantity of it is essential to health, so any excess, deficiency, or derangement of it causes corresponding derangement in living bodies. As the integrity of specific atomic relation is essential to the identity and preservation of all beings, so the natural integrity of electrical equilib- rium cannot be broken, or have its balance long disturbed, without an equal dis- turbance in all the functions influenced by definite electrical agency. 35. That observations and experiments give reason to believe, that there ig a certain defined amount, plus or minus, (above or below the natural standard of electric agency,) that is capable of producing certain defined diseases, in susceptible individuals. In such localities as have their natural quantity of electricity reduced, augmented, or disturbed to the specific degree calculated to induce specific disorder, the effects of such derangement will be propor- tioned to the cause. The particular kind of epidemic will depend upon, and be equivalent to, certain assumed points in the scale of disturbed electricity. 36. I have noticed that this regulator of the balance is broken on many occasions, long before the consequent break of health sets in ; that the loss of electric equilibrium in the earth and air precedes the loss of healthy equi- librium in man; that, like the supposed incubation of some disorders, the reaction consequent upon the oscillation of animal molecules does not