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

But again: it has been observed that when actual death has been produced by a bolt of lightning, the excitability of the nerves by the electric current entirely ceases ; yet it is often found that in these same cases the excitability of the muscle fibre remains. M. Matteucci remarks that no poison can dimin- ish the excitability of the nerve trunks and branches like hydro- cyanic acid and the curara poison; yet in these cases the mus- cular fibres retain their irritability to the immediate application of electricity. This will now and then be observed, as the au- thor has certainly experienced in his practice, in certain cases of paralysis ; i. e., where the large nerve trunks give no response to any kind of electric current that is brought to bear upon them, while at the same time the depending muscle groups sup- plied by that nerve readily contract, and where there is also a given sensation response to the direct application of strong cur- rents of induction. Alexander von Humboldt was the first to attempt to show, as he then thought he could produce by the voltaic current, con- tractions in a piece of fresh-cut muscle, deprived as much as possible of its nerve filaments. Midler, and Matteucci, and others followed up his researches here, until they, too, concluded that this kind of contraction can take place at the instant when the current commences to pervade the muscle, and at the mo- ment when it ceases to circulate in it; and this whatever be the direction of the current relative to the course of the muscu- lar fibre. They concluded, therefore, that the electric current alone, of all the agents tried, when it is applied directly to the naked muscle by the polarizing and more completely arranging and compacting the muscle molecules, is able, in the aggregate, to result in the shortening or contracting, even without the inter- vention of the nerves. But we must also bear in mind how dif- ficult it would be to exactly obliterate all nerve filaments of matter from the mass of muscle, while the resulting effects of the current under the given circumstances may be unquestion- ably correct. But we have ascertained that the nerves do possess in them- selves a certain electrical state. We know, moreover, that this