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

Lead Palsy. Lead paralysis is an accident most likely to occur in persons working in lead or its compounds, as painters, compositors, plumbers, lead-pipe workmen, and the hands in white-lead man- ufactories. It may and does occur frequently from drinking made, or adulterated, liquors or wines, fixed beer, or from taking- quack medicines, and clandestine prescriptions. Thus some drink the saturnine poison, others inhale it, while others are affected by handling it. An impure, or rather an impregnated water, as with acid, iron, or salts, if conveyed through leaden pipes, may also cause lead palsy. I believe, in fact, that a taint, or predisposing state, may be not unfrequently imbibed with drink- ing water that has lain in, or flowed through, lead service pipes. When the blood of a person has become to any great degree contaminated with lead, then there are produced various abnor- mal symptoms, and these are usually in the following order: first colic, next cramps, then neuralgia or amaurosis, and then the " dropping of the wrist." These are the first prominent symptoms of lead palsy. The extensor muscles of the upper ex- tremity, and most generally those only of the right forearm, are most liable to show it first; and these same finally suffer the most wasting. All the joints of the fingers are not equally affected. It is the first pihalanges that cannot be extended; while the power of motion in the two last phalanges of the same fingers is not impaired. This is because the interossei muscles are very rarely affected by lead. The paralysis soon extends up the arm, and we find even the triceps and the deltoid suffering the loss of substance and power. The electro-muscular con- tractility is then much diminished, and in a short time is utterly lost. After that occurs, wasting goes on rapidly. But this ruinous result should be avoided, as indeed it can be, by an early and efficient resort to electro-therapeutics, as this is the most potent remedy for lead palsy now known to the healing art. We notice that M. Tauquerel-des-Planches reports that out of one hundred and thirteen cases of lead palsy, ninety- three cases had this palsy in the arms, fourteen in the lower