Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.
210/740
- Publication/creation
- Boston : Ticknor and Fields, 1861.
- Physical description
- 3 unnumbered pages, 716 pages, 2 leaves of plates : illustrations ; 26 cm
- Contributors
-
Garratt, Alfred C. (Alfred Charles), 1813?-1891
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
- Notes
-
3d ed. has title: Medical electricity
Includes index and testimonials
- Type/technique
- Electronic books
- Subjects
-
Electrophysiology
Electrotherapeutics
- Attribution and usage
-
This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
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human beings, and in living animals, a natural electricity, under
the influence of a vital force that is as ceaseless as life, and in
some degree, at least, independent of mechanical, physical, or
chemical actions, whether exterior or interior, although it co-
works with them.
2. That this native or animal electricity is manifested under
the form of closed currents, circulating along the course of the
muscles, or along the course of the living nerves, but of which
we are able to collect only the smallest appreciable portions by
the assistance of our best instruments.
3. That the presence of this free electricity is subordinate to
the state of the life and well-being of the person or animal, and
that it totally disappears, together with the vital force and all
vitality, at death.
4. That in the nerves, as in the muscles, there is an electric
antagonism between the transverse course, which is negative,
and the longitudinal, which is positive.
5. That a great and sudden diminution is observed to be
brought about in the animal current of the muscles, at and
after the moment of powerful contractions ; and also in that of
the native current of the nerve, at and after the transmission of
a sensation or motion.
6. That the negative variation of the muscular current is not
permanent, even when the contraction is so, or rather seems
to be so, as in artificial tetanus — a state that is composed in
fact of a rapid succession of simple and sudden variations of
intensity ; that the muscular current does not recover its inten-
sity immediately, but gradually, and that after the contraction,
or the electrotonus, has ceased.
7. That the electric phenomena in the nerves of motion, and
in those of sensation, are for the most part identical; both of
these kinds of nerves transmitting the artificial galvanic current
of electricity in both directions equally well.
8. That the nerves differ from the muscles in their electric
relation in that, when the former are traversed in but a por-
tion of their length by a continuous current of galvanism, the
entire nerve assumes an electric or polar state, which is termed