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

Erichsen, professor of surgery at University College, we may keep our eye on the following peculiarities : — 1. Sciatica occurs usiially in persons of middle or advanced life ; the seat of the pain being back and below the articulation, and extending down the back of the limb, and there being no elongation of the limb, will enable us to effect the diagnosis here. 2. Neuralgia occurs at all ages; but the peculiar neuralgic pain, following the course of the nerves, or manifested over the ramification of certain superficial nerve branches, or the wide- spread and superficial pain and soreness, or the coexistence of the " hysterical joint" and hysterical temperament, the sex of the patient, and the absence of all actual local disease, is sufficient to make the case clear; but in young females it may be most readily confounded with the ulcerative sacro-iliac dis- ease. The obliquity of the pelvis which sometimes occurs in the simple neuralgia, and " hysteria of the hip," causing apparent elongation of the limb, is readily detected, and is diagnostic, for it is removed for the time while the patient lies upon her back. 3. Coxalgia. — Hip disease may occur at all times of life; but we must look out for that variety of hip disease that commences in the acetabulum, and primarily involves the pelvic bones, and only secondarily implicates the great joint. In hip disease the patient suffers most if pressure is made deeply just back of and above the trochanter, in the hollow behind that osseous promi- nence, or where pressure is made against the anterior part of the hip joint through the pectinalis muscle, and also when made upward from the foot; pressure of the head of the femur into the acetabulum, abduction and rotation outwards, aggravate to an unbearable degree the sufferings of the patient. Movements that influence the hip joint merely, as well as all other move- ments, produce the greatest pain just in the joint. 4. Rheumatism may occur at any stage of life and in either sex ; but there will usually be other marks of it either present or in the history .of the past, and the characteristic rheumatic pains will distinctively diagnosticate this sort of hip affection. 5. Spinal Disease, but more particularly that form of it which arises from an accumulation of pus, — as, for instance,