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

that the former is induced through the medium of the blood, the latter through that of an incident nerve. Of the former, the frog affected with strychnine presents the exact type; of the latter I doubt whether we possess an exact type in any experi- ment. No experiment has been devised, to my knowledge, to induce augmented excitability of the spinal system through the medium of an incident nerve or nerves, or of any part of the spinal system. It is said that the decapitated batrachian is more excitable than the whole or entire animal. But this I think is a mistake. The effects of excitation are controlled by efforts of volition in the perfect animal, but are uncontrolled in the decapitated animal. The difference, therefore, is rather ap- parent than real." Epilepsy. Epilepsy, according to Dr. Todd, has its primary source or "first cause" more frequently in the obviously disordered nutri- tion of some of the more important organs, and it is most prob- able that the brain itself, or rather some portion of it, is impli- cated. This can result, moreover, from a great variety of causes, mental or physical; in any case, however, it may then long continue as a mere disease of habit, which electric cur- rents may greatly aid in curing. (See Appendix F, Note 2.) " The pathology of convulsive diseases, as now understood," says Dr. Todd, " seems to show that if the nervous disturbance does not go beyond a certain point, the phenomena are limited to loss of consciousness and impaired intellectual action, and this with more or less sopor. If, however, the disturbance be more considerable, then epileptic convulsions are produced. If there is a still greater or more profound disturbance of the tuberciila quadrigemina, then the medulla oblongata and spinalis become excited, and the convulsions are complicated with a good deal of the tetanic character. Looking, then, to the whole assemblage of ganglionic centres interposed between the cere- brum and the spinal cord, as on the one hand including the centres of sensation, and probably also of the consciousness of the cerebral operations, as well as impressions on the organs of