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

always be quite sure that the patient will bear, or need, in the evening, what he took in the morning. Accidents from the indiscriminate use of electric currents, or from carelessness in their use, or where absolutely injudiciously applied, as to the case, the length of time, the strength of the current, or the direction of the current, are real and serious. When it is not managed so as to produce good effects, it may be doing an evil work. Indeed, the very same current that is not only harmless, but beneficial, for one, to another of the same age and sex may prove so powerful as to be actually injurious, or so inadequate as to be quite inefficient. There may be pro- duced, then, from too strong a dose of it, or too prolonged use of it at a time, a bruising, or soreness, or fatigue, or exalted irri- tability, a neuralgia, or even cerebral congestion and hemorrhage. Now, some of the slighter of these effects are possible to be pro- duced at the most prudent first seances; but in such a case the difficulty can be easily eradicated by treating it at the next time as an original and independent derangement. The author fully believes that where electric currents are applied to the patient without regard to the laws of their ac- tion on living tissues, they may by chance produce, instead of amelioration or cure, an actual aggravation of the acute or chronic malady, which degree may remain (as he believes he has seen unmistakable examples) equally as persistent, as a cor- rect use of the same currents will cause a bettering, (by pro- ducing the opposite polarization of the nerves, fibrils, and muscle fibres,) or even a complete restoration, that is also persistent. These are no imaginary evils. Scarcely a week passes but that some poor invalid sufferer presents for examination or treatment, who dates the "growing icorse " from a given time, when " gal- vanized" by some travelling " electropathist;" or perhaps an officious neighbor brought a battery and applied the currents so shockingly, perseveringly, or repeatedly, that the hands were cramped, the muscles pained, and the limbs tetanized. From that time the paralysis was greater, or the pain along the course of the nerve trunks more acute, the aches in the joints more pro- found and unbearable, or the contraction of the limb more per- 24*