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

Case. — Joseph M., of Cambridge, nineteen years of age, had uniformly good health, but mother is very rheumatic ; was attacked with wry neck, one day after skating, some two months ago; head turned to right side and firmly fixed by the apparently double process, viz., paralysis of the left stemo-cleido-nias'oideas muscle, and the clavicular portion of the trapezius on the one side, while there is a firm tonic contraction of the antagonizing muscles on the other; and these were as hard as wood, and utterly disabled him from holding up, rotating, or swinging his head in the least. The contracted muscles are painful to pressure, and are evidently ready to pass into a state of atrophy and degeneration. Treatment. — I first placed a large moist sponge electrode, which was the positive, near the base of the skull on the con- tracted side, with the negative electrode slid along, from half minute to half minute, from one to the other, on the lower por- tions of all the contracted muscles, with a current from twenty Daniell's elements, until their polarity was fairly modified ; and then the electrodes were removed to the opposite side and placed reversed on the relaxed and palsied muscles, employing a stronger up-running, prevailing current, but taking care to pro- duce strong and rapidly succeeding contractions in those muscles, both by suddenly breaking the current, and by reversing the current by the current-changer. In five sittings this patient was perfectly cured. (See p. 475, and Notes in Appendix.) Case. — M., a young lady, twenty-four years of age, presented for electric treatments; had suffered from long stages of ill health, and even from infancy bad had throat affections again and again, as sore throat, inflamed and ulcerated tonsils, en- largement of tonsils, inflammation of salivary glands, catarrh, and, at the same time, there were painful swellings of some of the flexor muscles of the arms, which had been repeatedly treated by Faradaic currents. I undertook the case, and first applied the primary current of galvanism daily for one month, mainly by embracing between the electrodes the enlarged and hardened glands about the throat. The effect was truly surprising, for after a few days, some large masses about the neck would actu- ally shrink and disappear while under the current and strong