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

tion, injuries, inflammation, or organic disease. There are also changes in the blood itself; and there are also disordered states of the nerves themselves, resulting often from functional causes, as in prolonged or excessive mental exertion, emotional excite- ment, &c. Other causes there are that act by sympathy, as through the nerves of special sensation ; for instance, vivid light, or loud noises. There are also very familiar examples of head pains from impressions made on the branches of the fifth pair, as well as on the gastric, and on the intestinal, or genital nerves. Now, the stomach and the liver are always blamed for these profound headaches, and doubtless they are often guilty; but I believe that a too great, or otherwise bad impression made at any one point, — as on the eye, in the head, or stomach, — will involve the whole in a paroxysm of derangement and pain. If this is made in the brain, the stomach will as certainly be deranged, and the tongue foul, the bowels will tardily throw off scybalas with mucus, etc., as if vice versa. This is a case of hyperesthesia of the gangli- onic nerves, and more particularly of that portion within the cranium. (See p. 401, and Appendix D, F.) Headaches and pains in the head, then, may have either a diffused peripheral site on the scalp, as in persons of high neurotic temperament, or the pains may follow the course of the supra-orbital nerve, or the temporal branches of the portio dura, or the branches of the sub-occipital, and it will show its character either as hemicranial, or as " claims hystericus" or as simple neuralgia; or the pain may have a periosteal seat, as in the rheumatic, or syphilitic ; while here we are examining, as I believe, true inter-cranial headaches, arising possibly from molecular alteration of the nerve substance of the brain. But I am most strongly inclined to consider the elaborate moss-like network of intercranial vascular nerve filaments of the sympa- thetic to be in almost, if not all, true profound headaches, the very focus and medium of communication to the sensorium. These are ganglionic nerves, as we have just shown, and attend every capillary and fringe of minute ultimate artery. Now, we know that periods, and habits of successions of