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

cise, sunlight, and air; while very many others arc not quite reached by any or all these rational, but, for the given case, in- sufficient means, until reenforced by the cooperating, and vitaliz- ing in-workings of correctly employed currents of electricity. Moreover, in studying the minute relations of acute and chronic nervous diseases and derangements, we find presented to our notice several points of departure : — First, we may find the general muscular and nervous electric circuit, also called " animal electricity," acting fiercely, irregu- larly, or perhaps very languidly; and either of these, from the peculiar condition of the blood, which in the one case renders it a too exciting- fluid, for the health of that living galvanic-like organism; or, in another case, it is too feeble, or too much poisoned, perhaps, to act with any degree of efficiency; or we may have actual disease of the cord, and brain, and ganglia parenchyma; or of the peripheral parenchyma, and its media, (nerves,) which servo as conductors or telegraphs to connect the outer stations of minute vitalized voltaic batteries with the great cervical ganglia and brain. Besides, we must bear in mind the natural nervo-electric relations of nutrition, growth, and repair, as well as the abnormal products, or deposits, occa- sionally produced simultaneously with the deviations from the usual standard of actions as observed in health. The essential character of inflammation is as little understood as fevers; and these two great classes of diseases are essentially different. The former is an abnormal action, tending to the formation of pus. Now pus is an organic cell; which, how- ever, is very different from the ordinary ultimate cells, of which the various parts of the organism is constructed. When in- flammation occurs, we have some greater or less deviation of the ordinary sensations, increase of temperature, and great vas- cularity. In fever, we have that sort of almost total absence of motion, which is termed " prostration." But this is not in any sense paralysis. The feelings are, for the time, unbalanced, perverted, and morbid. Certainly, all this goes to show the ex- tensive implications of the electro-nervous system and apparatus in these universal diseases. In actually developed phthisis, and