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

of medicine; but they are not of value to be recorded here, ex- cepting, perhaps, by allusion to one or two, to show the tolera- tion of those most ridiculous notions which prevailed up to those times in all departments of regular medical practice. Signor Pinati, of Venice, introduced Peruvian balsams and a variety of other medicinal substances into the glass cylinders of the differ- ent electrical machines he employed for the different classes of diseases. One Dr. Giuseppi Bruni employed in the cylinder of the frictional machine, with which he operated, certain purgative medicines, and the patient, after having been thus electrified, (sic,) is said to have experienced the same effects as if he had swallowed the medicine! However, the frictional machine has always found a place in the armamentarium of therapeutics to the present day, although very much less since Faraday discovered the induction current in 1831. "Within and during the last fifteen years, static elec- tricity has been considerably employed and made to accomplish some very wonderful cures in the electrical room of Guy's Hos- pital, in London, through the perseverance and skill of the cel- ebrated Dr. Golding Bird ; also, with and after him, by Dr. Gull, accurate accounts of which are found scattered along year by year in the voluminous reports of that noble and excellent institution. As a matter of history, for the actual starting point in this branch of medicine, we must go back for more than two thou- sand years, even to the days of the great philosopher, Thales of Miletus, who ranked as one of the seven wise men of Greece — to him who founded the Ionic sect. It was he who first men- tioned electricity as a remedial agent, some five hundred and forty-eight years before Christ. He also taught his pupils that electrized amber possessed a soul. History of the Discovery and Medical Uses of Galvanism. Galvanism, as is now well known, was discovered and demon- strated by Professor Luigi Galvani, of Bologna, in 1786, although he did not publish his discovery and commentary " De Viribus