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

CHAPTER II. EARLY HISTORY OP MEDICAL ELECTRICITY. History of the Medical Uses of Static Electricity. Our place is in the neio ivorld, our time in a new age. If we trace back but a little over one century, we shall find that medical electricity was a new theme, and formed but a short, undefined, and hence unimportant chapter in those works of systematic writers that treated of Therapeutics. The Leyden jar was then but just discovered; the physiological effects of the electric spark and shock were only surmised. Our Dr. Franklin had not demonstrated to the world the actual identity between the lightning of the clouds and the electricity produced by fric- tion. But one hundred and fifty years ago and electricity de- veloped from rubbing smooth pieces of wax and glass was the theme of universal wonder, and of scientific investigation. The astonishing powers, laws, and works of galvanism were utterly unsuspected. The relations of electricity to magnetism, and vice versa, remained yet hidden from the eyes of science for a long half century. Can we truly realize that water was then sup- posed by all the learned world to be a simple substance ; that the laws of heat were unknown ; that even the philosophers of 1760 did not dream of electricity as being the very key to physiology ; to molecular physics, and hence to metaphysics ; for penetrating and revealing the intimate structure, relation, and nature of bodies; that chemistry would be indebted to its subtile power for nice analysis and synthesis; for elucidating theories, and for forming entirely new compounds; that the physiologist would have deduced by its aid a most intimate knowledge of, and familiarity with, those innate forces that, hand in hand 6*