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

rent in various directions through the abdomen itself, may be quite sufficient. This remedy seemed to be the more adapted to the state of our patient after the bowels had been thus cleared out, for it acted upon them with wonderful energy and success. After this current had been passed for some time, directed from the back to the bowels, as well as from side to side, he had, in an hour after, a copious evacuation. In three hours he had another, and next morning a third. Flatus was also discharged in abun- dance. The abdomen contracted and fell greatly, but still not completely. The pain of the galvanic action, however, had been so great that the patient begged to have a day's respite. On the second morning, however, this remedy was again applied, but more gently ; and then again on the alternate mornings sub- sequently. He acquired by this means a daily discharge from his bowels, and sometimes two. The abdomen became more natural in size and form. Since those days he has had a natu- ral evacuation every morning, and without aid, either from laxa- tive or galvanism. He was dismissed, I should have said, after receiving fourteen treatments. " This is a case," says Dr. Christison, " which gives an excel- lent illustration of the influence exerted by galvanic currents over the animal functions. It appears to me to hold out a probability that the same remedy may prove serviceable in restoring the tone of the intestinal muscles in other forms of troublesome chronic flatulent distention of the abdomen." Dr. W. Cummings, of Edinburgh, gives the following graphic description of cases of his experience in the use of electro- magnetism in certain states of the bowels: " We are often consulted," he says, " by patients who, at the first glance, con- vey the impression that they are imperfectly nourished. They have an emaciated appearance. In detailing their symptoms, they lay great stress on a feeling of ' all gone,' or, rather, a faintness at the epigastrium ; they complain of exhaustion there. They generally next direct our attention to a more or less fixed pain, either in the left hypochondriac or iliac region, sometimes both, but more frequently in the latter — a pain from which they are rarely exempt, and which is sometimes very severe and