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

3. The correspondence between the paroxysmal character of epilepsy and that of other diseases called humoral, as ague and gout. 4. The introduction of certain animal poisons (as exanthem- ata) into the system can produce epileptic convulsions ; and to these might be added evidences derived from cases of hydro- phobia, hysteria, chorea, and tetanus, as occurring also in absence of structural lesions, and in still greater force by those strange manifestations of disordered excitement of the nerve centres which are manifested in neiirwmic or hysterical forms of convulsions, which always baffle the sagacity of the best physician to satisfactorily account for, and that of the most skilful practitioner to cure. The diagnosis of the hysterical form of epilepsy is mainly made out by observing the suddenness with which the several forms give successive place one for the other, as a choreic for tetanic, and this for epileptic, or paralytic, or perhaps passing off altogether. Thus the strange combinations or successions which they often present mark them from the more settled form of nerve disease that they so simulate. Dr. Copcland, in his great work, says, "I have not given a class of antispasmodics, because there is really no such class of medicines that possess the property of directly arresting spasms." But probably he had not become familiar with the modern methods of directing the electric current through nerves so as to be an anti-spasmodic, as well as an anti- paralytic, — not by diminishing their strength, but by nourish- ing them, and fortifying their power of endurance. Dr. E. Brown-Sequard is inclined to believe that epilepsy consists essentially in an exalted abnormal excitability of cer- tain parts of the cerebro-spinal axis, and in a simultaneous loss of the control that, in normal conditions, the Will possesses over the reflex faculty. He has shown that the same cause that produces the first convulsion in some muscles of the neck, the eye, the larynx, and the face, produces also a contraction of the blood vessels in the brain proper, and which contraction is necessarily followed by the loss of consciousness. MM.