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

see how often the stomach has been rendered responsible for ills that did not attach to it. This affection of the muscles may con- tinue as long as hysteria can, and persist to very advanced age. When it persists with intensity, the constant pain wears out the patient, rendering at last all active movements quite insupport- able. She perhaps becomes melancholic and emaciated, and pre- sents all the appearance of premature old age. Fortunately, we can now say, nothing is easier than the relief (cure) of this affection, under appropriate treatment. (See App. G, Note 2.) IV. Pleuralgia. — Pains in the muscle fibres at the side of the thorax are so common, that they have been familiarly noticed by all observers; but they have always been confounded with the true neuralgia. In the hysterical female they are most common, having been found by M. Briquet in two hundred and twenty- three out of three hundred patients in whom such were sought for. The seat of the pain here is rather fixed, extending usually as a semicircle, corresponding to the fifth, sixth, seventh, or even the eighth ribs, sometimes following their direction, and at others being still more oblique. This is found six or seven times more frequent on the left side than on the right, and he found it bi- lateral in only nineteen of the above cases. It usually comes on subsequently to the hyperesthesia of the other parts that have just been mentioned, it forming, as it were, but an extension of them. Hysterical pleuralgia can only be confounded with the pain of true pleurisy; it suffices, however, to be aware of the possibility of the former, and the then usual coexistence of epi- gastralgia and rachialgia, to prevent any error. It is perhaps more readily confounded with intercostal neuralgia, by which name many cases of this hysterical pleuralgia have been erro- neously indicated. The distinction between these two is: First. The hysterical or muscular hyperesthesia does not follow the di- rection of the nerves and their branches, but is invariably found at the fifth, sixth, and seventh ribs, while the accompanying rachialgia and perhaps epigastralgia are situated quite above the points they should be, if dependent upon neuralgia. Sec- ond. The pain bears no resemblance to that of neuralgia, for it is excited at any point that is compressed, without radiating