Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/226

 Soothing Our Soldiers Electrically

Electric cages will put new energy in them when worn out. Trench-foot and shell shock also to be aided electrically

By Lloyd E. Darling

��OF course, you wonder what the pic- ture on our cover means. You see a medical officer operating elec- trical apparatus, and also a marine inside of a cage. What's the marine in for?

So we introduce to you a little known development in the field of science.

Government officials recently decided to establish in all American war hos- pitals in this country and Europe, elec- trical apparatus for the treatment of wounded and ailing army and navy men. And the peculiar part about it is that the apparatus to be used is not unlike that which every young experimenter in this country has played with for a long time past. The coils and condensers of the boy's wireless apparatus are familiar ob- jects; also the glass-plate static machine that he inherited from some Hghtning rod demonstrator, or that he made himself. That such machines as these, though naturally of larger size and better quality, have a practical usefulness in an army hospital is unexpected.

Electrical currents of some types are of special benefit in the many ills common to soldiers, and in particular to those that do not yield readily to ordinary treatment. For instance, trench foot. What is trench foot? It is a disease likely to afflict any of our men who have to stand for hours at a time in cold, water-filled trenches and in the slime and ooze that covers battle grounds. At first, a man loses all feeling in his feet. They swell and pain. Gangrene may develop. Then there's rheumatism, sciatica, lumbago, the "trench back," which frequently re- sults when men have been buried alive, frost bite, shell shock, neuritis, wounds from which there is a large discharge of pus; sprains, contusions, skin diseases, hysterical paralysis, tissues broken up by irregular bullet wounds, and so on. Don't get the idea from this array that electric- ity is a cure-all and the long-looked-for panacea. It is only lately that the cura- tive properties of electricity have been

��systematically utilized. It takes a head to be both a doctor and an electrical expert. This is the principal reason why the sys- tem has not been applied before. But as far back as 1907, in the Moroccoan war, the French found electrical methods in- valuable. In this war, they have been developed to a still greater extent.

Most men have heard a little how elec- tricity may be used to benefit and cure certain ills. They know that doctors — some of them quacks — sometimes use electrical apparatus and that there is al- ways a great to-do around such places, what with the sparks and everything. But just what does it amount to?

Says Dr. William Benham Snow, an authority on the subject:

Electricity operates in three principal ways in the curing of disease; mechanically, chemically and thermally. These are the same actions as electric- ity brings about among machines. In other words, the mechanical result produced is an actual move- ment of or in the flesh, due to the direct stimu- lation of the muscular tell, or as a result of the nerve and muscular mechanism acting together. Contraction results. Chemical effects may lye of the electrolysis order, or in the nature of cooking, or may be actual chemical reactions within the cells as a result of the electrical stimulus. Thermal ef- fects may border on those of chemical nature, but es- pecially result in increased blood circulation through an affected part, stimulating greatly growth of bacteria-destroying blood cells, and so on. The especial advantage of the heat produced as a result of electrical apparatus is that it may be made to permeate an affected part in just the right way. The field for electrotherapy has wdened immensely since the war began.

The man on our cover is surrounded by electricity. He sits in an invisible elec- trical field, produced by what is known as a d'Arsonval apparatus, much like a Tesla coil, except that the current is greater. The man in the Cage is permeated through and through by the electrical field. You know if you take an ordinary electric light current and send it through a small coil of wire in which is an iron core, you can heat the core red hot if the current strength is great enough. Eddy currents are set up in the core.

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