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

not deter from early and gentle, but persevering efforts to save the limbs, all we can, by manual exercise; by counteracting with suitable apparatus the tendencies to mal-posture from the con- tractions ; by exercising and thus nourishing the muscle fibres by electricity, audi/" cold, by keeping the entire legs and feet all the time warm. Every hour they are allowed to remain cold the contraction and rigidity will be the greater. "When, in a para- plegic affection, we discover that anaesthesia prevails over the loss of power, (i. e., is greater,) we must not in that case expect to find a local or circumscribed lesion of the spinal cord, but examine for a diseased action, or state, in some peripheral por- tions of the nervous system, or whether there are not indica- tions of a brain origin. Which of these two causes prevails, the general history of the case will aid us in deciding. Cervical paraplegia occasionally occurs, manifesting itself in the ujjper extremities, the legs being more generally not in the least affected ; while, if they should be involved, they are always much less so than the arms. The muscles of the shoul- der and arm, and more particularly the right shoulder and arm, are first affected ; and, not unfrequcntly, this is the whole of the affection. This disease sometimes attacks both arms at once, or begins in one, and so passes over to the other also. At first there are usually pain and soreness in the muscles involved; but after existing for a longer time, no modification of the skin sensation remains, but there then exists an obstinate paralysis, which prob- ably commences in the muscle fibres themselves, or through some perverted action of the nerves of those parts ; for there is wasting as well as palsy. For this employ Faradaization. A sailor, just arrived, as second officer in the bark S., from the Mediterranean Sea, presented with paralysis of both arms, — complete in the right arm, but partial in the left, — produced by protracted cold water affusions for his fever, immediately after sailing from Smyrna. There were softness and atrophy of all the shoulder and arm muscles on the right, and those of the left doubtless tending to the same condition. For this otherwise nobly framed fellow I adopted localized Faradaization, or rather by my team-electrodes, as it were bathed him with electricity over