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

electrode, which, by trials on healthy persons or on the very recent subject, are shown to produce the most prompt and powerful ef- fects. By this method, then, we succeed more surely, use less current, accomplish more in less time, and occasion less pain; and in the more doubtful cases of apoplectic paralysis, we also avoid any great degree of hazardous excitement of sensitive nerves, which will yet be more generally acknowledged to pro- duce a uniformly greater or less degree of reflex action. We have learned from Sir Charles Bell, as well as from our own trials, that the muscles do not distinguish between the sen- sation of heat and cold; and, besides, every surgeon is familiar with the fact how little pain the muscles experience when being cut through ; yet it may be possible to produce pain in muscles by means of the electric excitement. Dr. Duchenne observed that the electrization of raw muscle surface in a wounded fleshy patient produced only a dull kind of sensation, but no actual pain. I have already spoken of the manner in which large muscles can be brought into a painless, active contraction ; and these form no exceptions, but are rather the daily experience in my practice. Dr. Romburg, in his learned and excellent work on Nerves and their Diseases, distinguishes two great classes of conditions of the sensitive nerves of muscles — the one hyperccslhelic, the other anaesthetic. The normal shortening of the muscles dur- ing movements of the members takes place, it is true, with- out causing much, if any, sensation. But we learn further, from M. Weber's researches, what part the muscles take in the sense of feeling of tension, as when carrying burdens, as also in the pains we feel during cramps in the calf of the leg, during inflammations of the muscles, &c.* Now, this is a difficult ques- tion to solve, whether in all these cases the sensation experienced proceeds from the abnormal state of the muscle fibres themselves, or from their sunxmndings of sheathing tissues. According to the researches of Dr. Remak, the tendinous prolongations of the thin, flat muscles, as of the diaphragm, the latissimus dorsi, of * Ludwig's Physiology, -vol. i. p. 360.