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

contraction of the nerve, prevents its polarity from being estab- lished, and consequently arrests the transmission of motion or of sensation, or of both, as seen in some paralysis. It is emi- nently probable, says M. De la Rive, that during all muscular contractions, as well as during the transmission of sensations, the nerve and the muscle are brought into operation at the very extremity of the nerve, and not all along its course. Electricity in the animal frame is, hence, the force by means of which all nervous action is exerted, — not created at the mo- ment when the nerve acts, but preexisting in the particles of all organic matter. While under the absolute influence of vitality or life, these particles are arranged in a special, methodical manner, so that life cannot be considered as a consequence of the electric nature and arrangement of these molecules; but life must, on the contrary, be regarded as the cause of their mode of grouping, and consequently, indirectly, of the phenom- ena that result. Let life but bo taken away, the particles still preserving their electric polarity and property, — i.e., their sim- ple polarity, — and they are found grouped now quite differently. Here, they simply obey the forces of equilibrium that are proper to them, and present nothing but the ordinary phenomena of inorganic matter. Such is a dead body. According to M. Matteucci and Alfred Smee, the cause of natural currents of animal electricity is to be attributed to the chemical action that is peculiar to living organisms, where arte- rial blood is in contact with the tissues, and consequently in the living voltaic arrangement for the life, nutrition, and repair of all the tissues, &c. ; while Dubois-Reymond and De la Rive teach that these are subordinate to an undefinable vital force, and that the nerves in man are endowed with native nervo-elec- tric currents. We find, as is well known, that if we take a frog, and place a small bit of the curara poison, as by vaccination, just under the skin, the frog is soon killed. If, now, we electrize the large nerve trunks, we find they a*e dead; but if we touch the muscles with one of the electrodes, and that even with the weakest cur- rents, they twitch most violently; and this lasts longer than