Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XI.djvu/346

 334 MEDICAL ELECTRICITY the direction of De Haen with considerable success. In France Jallabert, Sigaud-Lafond, Bertholon, and others became enthusiastic ad- vocates of its application ; and especially Mau- duyt, who made a favorable report to the royal society of medicine in 1773. The agent was employed in every form then attain- ablein baths, in electric jets and streams, and in shocks. Cavallo, in his " Essay on the Theory and Practice of Medical Electricity" (London, 1780), collected all the various ideas of his day on the subject, by which it was cred- ited with being of service in paralysis of the muscles, impaired vision and hearing, chorea, epilepsy, chronic rheumatism, scrofulous en- largement of the glands, and in reanimating the apparently dead. The natural magnet had been used by Paracelsus, and its mysterious properties were greatly extolled by him ; and the use of artificial magnets by Maximilian Hell of Vienna drew considerable attention to this form of electricity as a curative agent. But the magnet, unless employed to induce electric currents, is almost inert for this pur- pose, and consequently practical men could never from this, or from frictional electricity alone, derive that degree of benefit commensu- rate with the inseparable disadvantages from delay, exposure of person, &c., attending their use. The discoveries of Galvani and Volta gave a new electric force, and the contro- versy between their followers revived the in- terest of the medical profession and physicians generally in electro-therapeutics. In 1797 Humboldt published his celebrated work, Ue- ler die gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser, in which the power of galvanism to change the secretions was shown, as also the dependence of nervous sensibility upon external circum- stances, such as muscular exertion and diseased condition. The book exerted a profound in- fluence, not only upon the development of the science of medical electricity, but upon the progress of physiology. The resuscitation of persons inanimate from suffocation or nervous derangement attracted about this time much attention, and Hufeland and Sommering made a series of experiments with special reference to this subject, arriving at the conclusion that the phrenic nerve offered the best pathway to the galvanic current for restoring suspended animation. Pfaff, Reil, Humboldt, and others also recommended galvanism as an efficacious agent in cases of paralysis of certain organs, and Valli proposed it as a test in cases of rrent death. The introduction of Volta's in 1799, by which the intensity of the galvanic current was greatly augmented, gave an additional advantage, as by it penetration into deeper parts of the body was possible. Loder, Bischoff, Lichtenstein, Hers, and others directed their attention to its application in cases of paralysis of the extremities and nerves of special sense. At the same time Prof. Schaub in Cassel, and Eschke, director of the institution for the deaf and dumb in Berlin, employed it in cases of impaired hearing and of deaf mutes. But owing to the frequent failures of electricity to realize the hopes of its friends, the great body of scientific physicians were slow to recognize it as a trustworthy therapeutical agent, and it fell into the hands of charlatans, who offered the voltaic pile for sale as a panacea. The circumstance that mes- merism, which had made its appearance some time before, was connected in the public mind with electricity and magnetism, had the effect of discouraging practitioners from making in- vestigations in that direction. Faraday's dis- covery of inductive electricity in 1831 was the commencement of a new era in the history of medical electricity. The construction of mag- neto-electric machines by Saxton, Keil, Et- tinghausen, and Stohrer offered facilities for the use of electricity in medicine not before known ; but these machines were costly, and Wagner, Rauch, Duchenne, and Du Bois-Rey- mond made cheaper voltaic apparatus of con- siderable intensity ; and physicians and scien- tific men generally employed much of their time in making experiments. Among the Eng- lish who engaged in this pursuit were Marshall Hall, Golding Bird, Stokes, Phillips, Graves, and Donovan; among the French, Poiseuille, Petrequin, Masson, Duchenne, and A. Becque- rel ; and among the Germans, "Weber, Heiden- reich, Richter, Moritz Meyer, Schultz, Erd- mann, Baierlacher, Eckhardt, Remak, Althaus, and Rosenthal. Pravaz was the first to con- ceive the idea of curing aneurism by galvano- puncture ; the English surgeon Listen was the first to apply the method to the human sub- ject ; the Italian Cinisilli was the first to make a successful operation. The manner of apply- ing electricity in therapeutics has been various, and at present differs in different cases. The earliest method of using the frictional elec- tricity of the ordinary machine was to take the sparks from the prime conductor, soon after which it was the practice to take sparks from the patient, who was placed upon an in- sulated stool. On the introduction of the Ley- den jar, shocks were taken from this appa- ratus, but no great degree of system in its ap- plication was ever attained. The most remark- able and practical successes of electricity have perhaps been in the domain of surgery, by the employment of electric currents of suffi- cient quantity to raise platinum wire to a white heat. This mode of employment cannot be strictly called therapeutic, as the action is simply one of heat, and possesses no intrinsic properties beyond those of the actual cautery. But it is applied in situations where it would be impossible to apply the same degree of heat produced in any other manner. Galvano-caus- ty, as this operation is called, is employed for extirpating and abolishing tumors and diseased growths. A battery of from 16 to 24 of Grove's cells, or an equivalent battery of any form, is all that is required to produce the current. (See GALVANISM.) Electrodes of