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

least relieved by it. This form of the affection will usually run its course in spite of treatment, although the medical attendant can influence it to run a milder and a more bearable course, and usually guard against the liability to metastasis, i. e., translation or extension of it to some internal part, especially to the heart. But the acute form of rheumatism rarely terminates in the chronic form. The person that is subject to the one kind seldom is found to have the other, and vice versa. But the occurrence of either kind leaves a liability to its recurrence on very slight exposure or error of diet or habit, or even from a change of wind or weather, i. e., change in the atmospheric electricity. Chronic rheumatism of almost every sort, whether capsular and seated in the lining membrane of the joints and bursae of the tendons, or when it attacks the feet or the hands, the hips or shoulders, the knees or elbows, the muscles, fascia, or perios- teum of the skull, vertebrae, or shafts of bones, — all, all of them are wonderfully amenable to the catalytical power of Galvanism, or the disturbing force of Faradaism. It is known that the pain of these chronic forms is sometimes confined to one or sev- eral joints; and at another time, it shifts from one part to another, and that without being attended with inflammation or fever. The patient is very liable to become lame, or even crip- pled by contractions and pseudo-anchylosis, and liable moreover to frequent painful recurrences. The effusion of coagulable lymph, after each fresh attack, tends to a permanent thickening of the parts. Now, unless these deposits have existed very long, or have far degenerated into old cartilaginous, callous, or chalk and tendon nodosities, so as to greatly resist the in-working of the current, electricity, and particularly that form of it we designate as primary or galvanic, and even electro-magnetic cur- rents often, can solve out and remove these deposits of effusion, wherever their seat may be, if recent. Rheumatalgia, then, even where it resists all other treatments, can often be reached and nearly eradicated by the correct and thorough use of electric currents, at least for that time, so as no other remedial power can do it. If a rheumatism is thus treated and broken up at every new attack, for a few times, if the