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

with vitality, rule over living bodies, and are next to the very- mainspring of life itself; and finally, that the physician and surgeon -would find in it a very peculiar power for healing, and restoring from a class of diseases that baffled all skill, and -were considered incurable ? One hundred years before that, and it has been well said, that Newton was a schoolboy. Gravita- tion, or a code of laws for the universe, was unthought of. The globe had not been weighed as in a balance, nor had the true figure of the earth been recognized. Of course the " Prin- cipia " and the " Optics " of Sir Isaac Newton were as yet unwrit- ten. Electricity and magnetism were scarcely acknowledged as sciences. Philosophers were speculating on their properties and their importance, but they never obtained a control over them. Can we realize, that but one hundred years before that, and we plunge into the very abyss of the dark ages ? where, not only medicine and the physical sciences that relate to the healing art, but also all the physical sciences, were sleeping, as they had done for a long thousand years before ? Without recounting our own otherwise untold inheritance of religious and social treasures, what rich legacies of chemistry, botany, geology, geography, mathematics, mechanics, physiology, electricity, and electro-magnetism were laying in stores for these generations then unborn ! But over what was then known there lay a pon- derous mass of dogmatic theories. No free discussion, no sub- ject for dissection, no correct idea of the work of the lungs, or of the heart; no microscope, no barometer, or thermometer was heard of. In science there was as yet no minutiae, or speciality ; it was only at the risk of life that any new thought, or even any ascertained fact, was then given to the world. But now we come to an age that has both the facilities and the inducements for that minute and scrupulous observation, that discovers to us by the aid of inductive philosophy, as it were, new continents in science, inviting us to labor and usefulness. Such are the indissoluble links that bind electricity with physiology, and also with the whole science and art of medicine, that a more intimate study of it, in these relations at least, has become quite indis- pensable to all medical men of the present day. In therapeu-