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

that the actual first set of symptoms of tubercular disease consists simply in the " wasting of flesh, if this is attended with a lower scale of health and strength." Now, this loss of muscle plumpness, as well as juices and fat, is first noticed, according to several good authorities, in three principal places: the first region of flesh consuming is the face ; second,the hands; third, over the sacral bones. The sacral region, where it first gives out, is lame and sore, and looks poor. The hands look poor and " scrawny," the muscles of the arms and legs are soft and flabby. If the face shows it first, the eyes stare ; the brow, temples, and scalp look lean ; the muscular tissues of all the limbs soon waste, and the pectoral muscles, as also all the chest muscles, waste away, and then the breathing is already become imperfect and weak. This diminished respiration is soon at- tended with cough ; then there are pains about the thorax. The patient next is sensible of something wrong, and is conscious of a sense of general debility. The fact is, nutrition is lost; the vital powers are flagging, for the wasting of the organism, in spite of eating, is more rapid than the repair. Then comes a stage of spirit depression; not the cause of consumption, but caused by the already deficient vitality, and all the more helping on the catastrophe ; for it is a law of our being, that where nerve structure is not itself nourished, it, too, will fail in its work, just as surely as muscle fibre fails of power from the same cause. With diminished nervous power we all knoiv hoiv the " emotions" begin to master the former intellectual vigor, and there is no nat- ural resistance made to any accidental debilitating attack, be- cause of an absent vital energy. If appetite flags, it is from the absence of the demands of the general vital element in the body and brain ; while the capacity for digestion still remains unimpaired. This, however, is not always understood, but it is usually blamed, and hence incorrectly treated. Now. I wish to be distinctly understood to say, to every intelligent practitioner, that all this may occur, and in thousands of cases does occur, and yet may be cured in almost every instance. In these more early marks of an insidious disease, whose fatal end, though not so speedy, is yet even more inexorable than