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

body the blood is most essential, these, nothing less than true voltaic or animal electric actions and life force, must also have an influence. Furthermore, since it is self-evident that the circulation of the blood has thus to do, more or less, with every operation of the living body, I will only add that these experiments and considerations demonstrate the vast importance of employing artificial electricity, if possible, as a co-worker with nature's similar actions in our organisms as a rational, natural, and extensive remedial agent. " Hallerian Irritability " and Electro-physiological Experiments. Humboldt, in his Cosmos, has called astronomy the science of the universe without; but here, as a philosopher remarks, we are observing the no less suggestive and astonishing phenomenon through electro-physiology, viz., the science of the universe within. As we have already shown, the sum total of the entire apparatus of human life is but a due balance of forces acting and reacting as an elastic equilibrium which thus continues dur- ing health, but with an ever-varying and natural fluctuation, produced from impressions necessarily made from the world without, upon or through the peripheric nerve-pole, or else upon the inner nerve-pole from the same source, or else from ideas therein generated. Dr. Francis Glisson appears to have been the first to use the word " irritability " in a physiological sense.* But he ascribed an irritability proper to all the tissues of the human organism, even to the fluids and bones; and thus " motiva ftbrarum facul- tas,nisi irritabilis foret, vel perpetuo quiesceret vel perpetuo idem ageret. Actionum igitur earum varietates et differentia; earvn- dem irritabilitatem dare demonstrant." But the great Haller was the first to declare the vis museulosa insita;] i.e., a property inherent in the muscular fibre that is capable of being excited to contraction, independent of any immediate instru- * Tractatus de Ventriculo et Intestinis. Batavor, 1691, p. 168. t Elementa Physiologist?, vol. iv. lib. xi. Lusanna?, 1762.