Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/559

Rh of its limbs could be bent. The attack over, it regained its senses, but the least impression, at all vivid, sufficed to bring on a new attack. Ascending currents were first applied to the spinal marrow. The child was at once seized with a violent crisis. Descending currents were then used for fifteen days in succession, after which the little patient regained health. A young girl aged seventeen, in an hysteric condition, presented very strange symptoms in the larynx, the velum of the palate, and the facial muscles, among others a sort of barking, followed by vehement sniffing and horrible grimaces. By placing the positive pole in the patient's mouth against the arch of the palate, and the negative pole on the nape of the neck, all these morbid affections were completely subdued. The disposition of the poles in the reverse order, on the other hand, aggravated them. After sixteen repetitions of electric treatment, the young girl was almost completely cured, retaining only a muscular twitch of little importance, compared with her former ailments. Several cases of tetanus also were treated with complete success by similar methods. This terrible disease, the most fearful of all surgical complications, is due to an acute inflammation of the spinal marrow. It is followed by such an alteration of the motor nerves, that all the muscles of the body experience general contraction, and a painful rigidity that by degrees attacks the vitally essential organs. When an attack of this kind reaches the muscles of the chest and heart, death occurs, through asphyxia. In such a case the continuous current restores the motor nerves to their normal state. Two other chronic diseases of the spine, the first being particularly serious—progressive muscular atrophy and locomotive ataxy—often yield to the rational use of electricity, or at least are checked in their progress, the natural issue of which is death. It is worth remarking that these two disorders were discovered and described by Duchenne, in the course of his researches into this method of treatment. Electricity served his purposes of diagnosis, as it serves in physiology as a means of study, taking in that science the place of a kind of reactive agent, and revealing functional differences that no other process could have detected. To it alone, according to the way in which it affects a nerve or a muscle, belongs the power, under certain circumstances, of determining the nature and even the degree of alteration in nervous or muscular elements.

Aldini said that galvanism afforded a powerful means of restoring vitality when suspended by any cause. Several physicians, at the beginning of this century, restored life by this means to dogs, after they had undergone all the processes of drowning, and seemed dead. Halle and Sue proposed at that period to place galvanic machines in the different quarters of Paris, particularly near the Seine. This wise and useful plan has not yet been put into execution, though all experiments made since that time confirm the proof of the efficiency of electricity in cases of asphyxia and syncope, produced either by water or