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

If these views are correct, the indications for treatment are twofold. First, to arouse the vaso-motory nerves into at least temporary activity, so as to relieve special symptoms. Secondly, to give these permanent vigor, hy improving the general inner- vation and nutrition of the whole body, and particularly of its surface. To this end employ electricity, food, air, and rest ; to these the various tonic medicines are mere aux- iliaries. (See Appendix F, G.) Young women frequently suffer from pains about the mam- mary region, and the intercostal spaces. These respectively are very often mistaken for p/euritis, or something else besides what they truly are, because these very different pains, occurring in the same place, are not studied and distinguished. But if you seek access to the dorsal or cervical region, and press gently along the sides of the spinous processes of the vertebra?, but not on them, or else along the lower margin of the ribs, i. e., tra- cing the fingers along between the ribs, from the spine forwards, you will very quickly awaken the pain of neuralgia, which may be at the point of pressure, or it may be awakened at some little distance from it, but in the course of the nerve, or in its peri- pheric branches. If the peripheric branches that terminate in the integument are thus aroused, it is still neuralgia; but if the deeper terminal (motor) nerve branches, that are lost in the muscle fibres, are the seat of the pain, and are aroused not so, but rather by touching the surface any where over it, then we have muscular hyperesthesia, which after all is probably only a neuralgia of the terminal twigs of true motor nerves. This will prove quite a sufficient test to satisfy that you have there either found one of Talleix's painful spots, and the pain is a fair neu- ralgia, or else is that other nerve manifestation that we call muscular hyperesthesia, (and has been called also muscular rheumatism, or neuralgic rheumatism of the muscles,) but not a pain proceeding from an inflammatory action, (except it be about the nerves.) but certainly not in the pleura, nor in the viscera of the thorax. (See Appendix G.) Spinal Irritation. — The views of Dr. Inman, of the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, should certainly receive our careful considera-