Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/171

Rh the metals act when they are applied to the skin. It is by the development of feeble electric currents in consequence of the contact of the metal with the moist and salty skin. The currents, although they have not enough intensity to be felt, are strong enough to modify the condition of the sensory nerves, cause anæsthesia to disappear, and reëstablish sensibility. Experiments made directly for that object have established the probability of this theory.

Magnets, which may be compared to very feeble electric currents, exert an action on the skin very like that of metals. The phenomena are very clear; but, instead of curing anaesthesia, magnets transfer it, causing it to disappear from one side and pass to the other side. If, for example, we apply a magnet to a patient insensible on the right side, at the end of half an hour the right side will have become sensible while the left side will have lost its sensibility, showing that the disease, instead of disappearing, has been carried over from one side to the other. Does not this facility with which the morbid spot may be moved exclude every hypothesis of a deep material lesion of the nervous centers? The facts of metallotherapy and magnetotherapy are of great interest in physiology as well as in clinics; but the exposition of them is very dry, and even this short glance at them may seem too long. I pass to the description of symptoms which we might call demoniacal, and which constitute the grand attack of hystero-epilepsy.

It would be hard to imagine a more terrible spectacle than that of one of these demoniac fits. The body pulsates with tremors and violent shocks. The muscles are contracted, so tense that we might believe them to be on the point of bursting. Great bounds, frightful cries and howlings, confused vociferations, indescribable contortions which we would not have supposed a human creature capable of making—such is the hideous picture which the hysterical patient presents when she is seized with an attack. After one has witnessed a scene of this character, he will be less astonished that the simple credulity of the men of the middle ages made them see in the phenomena the intervention of evil spirits, and that they supposed that only the devil could provoke such a furious exasperation of all the forces of the body.

As we study more closely the attacks of epileptic hysteria, we perceive that, in the face of this violent appearance of disorder, the disease has its regular, distinct periods. Nothing is at hazard. Every symptom, however unordered it may seem, appears in its turn with a surprising regularity, we might almost say punctuality. M. Charcot and his pupils have shown that the demoniac fits embrace three well-characterized periods.