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

succeeded in curing by means of electric currents, and with it the attending paralysis. From the foregoing facts and deductions, we may be led to suppose that wherever there is a loss of electro-muscular con- tractility in given muscles, we may fear that those muscles are lost forever; but we must also recollect that the retained electric sensibility in a case where there is lost electro-contractibility, which a patient may still now and then exhibit, while the most implicated muscles are subjected to strong induction currents, is, as we have before said, certain evidence that the nervous com- munication with the central organs is not utterly cut off. If, then, the muscles have not degenerated by change of structure into fat, we are after all allowed to hope, but not flatter — to work, but not promise; for now and then wo do realize, after patient and persevering treatments of such, the happiest results. We think we are justified in summing up the following as the order of succession, and amount of therapeutic phenomena, such as are manifested in these and similar cases, when under the in- fluence of Galvanic or Faradaic treatments :— First, there is an exaltation of sensibility which may amount to considerable, but transitory hyperesthesia in the sensitive branches of those nerves touched by the current while reaching the underlying muscle, or muscle groups. Second, there is a more or less speedy return of voluntary movements in the muscles that were paralyzed, but in only such as did not entirely lose their susceptibility to the electric stimulus; and next, those that did not entirely lose both their electro-con- tractibility and muscular sensibility. Third, there is an increased size, solidity, and nutrition of the blighted muscles; and then there is soon shown returning vol- untary movements, first in the muscles, and then in the limbs — and that, first nearest the body, and then successively farther out, and last of all the hand or foot. But this latter succession we have not unfrequently seen reversed in the order of events. Professor Trousseau of Hotel Dieu, in speaking of a case which was a most complete hemiplegia, as regards movement, while the general sensibility, the senses, and the intellect were manifestly 43*