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

the sensitive nerves; while the opening of the up-running cur- rent is felt merely in the motory, where the electric stream trav- erses a mixed nerve. But we find that Dubois-Reymond, more recently, does not sanction the terms idiopathic and symptomatic, but says, " We do not yet possess any grounds on which to establish the immediate excitement of the muscles to motion, by means of the current, as we have no right to ascribe two causes for one and the same effect, when one is quite sufficient to account for it." M. Nobili thereupon produced the results of his researches, which can be considered as forming an epoch — a second start- ing point — in the history of this department of physiology and therapeutics. The greater part of his work, however, was also directed to the laiv of convulsions, which was always thought by those earlier writers as so important. But in the latter part of his treatise we find the following conclusions, or rather doubtful deductions; for he says, — " By the rapidly repeated closure and opening of the circuit that embraces a frog thigh, there appears a phenomenon which bears the greatest resemblance to ordinary tetanus." Nobili seems to suspect that in this idiopathic and traumatic disease, the nerve fibrils are subjected to similarly rapid changes of ex- citement and relaxation, that, taken together, produces the tetanic spasms. He states that he has observed more than once, that a frog which, from some unknown cause, had fallen into a tetanus, has remained in that condition also during the working of one direction of the current; but, by reversing the direction of that current, the muscles relaxed. He alludes to this fact for starting the query, whether the steady current working in one certain direction, or perhaps in both directions in rapid suc- cessions, may not possibly constitute the very specific means for quieting the tetanus, or rather the means for preventing its de- velopment ; but he does not seem to take into the account any sort of reference to the cause of the tetanus; it must be as- sumed that the cause of the tetanus is already removed. Let us now, says Nobili, proceed from tetanus to paralysis, and ask, what is the real condition obtained when we apply an electric