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

where the rigidity is transitory, he has found that electricity can cause it to diminish still more and more rapidly, if em- ployed with prudence and skill. It is scarcely necessary to mention in this connection, that where the state of lesion of the cercbro-spinal axis is evidently but the recent arrest of softening, or is the consequence of cere- bral or spinal tumor, or of bony pressure, it is then invariably (when so fairly judged) best to proscribe absolutely any employ- ment of electricity whatever. It certainly cannot be calculated to remove the cause, nor yet ordinarily in such cases ameliorate the temporary suffering. Dr. Duehenne, therefore, concludes, as the result of his great experience, that the electro-muscular contractility is always normal in cerebral paralysis; i. c., that there is no difference between the response of the muscles of the paralyzed limbs and those of the healthy; but this propo- sition, the author must say, is not entirely in accordance with his own observations while testing and treating such patients. Marshall Hall, as well as Duehenne, believed that in true brain paralysis, the muscles remain intact; but on the con- trary, that in paralysis arising from a spinal origin, the electro-muscular contractions entirely fail. But this last prop- osition, although defended by the former, is not fully corrob- orated by the latter; yet he allows that he does find, from lesions of the spinal cord, that muscular irritability is dimin- ished, and almost, if not quite, always so, as he had often proved by testing with the currents the several affected muscles. But Duehenne found at least one fair exception ; for, although there did exist such a lesion and cause, yet there was complete electro-contraction of the affected muscles. As the patient soon after died of a fever, the peculiar lesion was proved by an au- topsy. There was found a complete disappearance of the gray substance on the median line in each of the two halves of the spinal marrow. But in all other cases where he could actually test the fact by an autopsy, he says he found a corresponding diminution of the electro-muscular contraction of the palsied muscles. Duchenue lays down, moreover, as an important ride, that