On the medical uses of electricity : a clinical lecture / by George W. Balfour.

  • Balfour, George William, 1823-1903.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the medical uses of electricity : a clinical lecture / by George W. Balfour. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    organs of the nervous system, where trifling alterations may be fraught with momentous consequences. From this point of view it seems probable that of late years static or frictional electricity has been too much neglected, though the main reason for this has un¬ doubtedly been the cumbrous nature of the machine for generating it, as well as the difficulty of fulfilling all the conditions needful for its successful employment. If the knuckle of the operator, or, better still, a knob of metal connected to the earth by a metallic chain, is presented to the sur¬ face of a patient statically electrified, sufficiently near for the accumulated electricity to overcome the resistance of the interven¬ ing stratum of air, this electricity is discharged, not, as with the brush, as an imperceptible aura, but in the form of one or more sparks. This is called Franklinization by sparks. It is accom¬ panied by a slight perception of “shock; and if the sparks suc¬ ceed one another rapidly, a certain amount of fibrillation is produced in the superficial muscles, and a certain degree of skin irritation is also produced, revealed by superficial reddening, ac¬ companied by white circumscribed wheals, which disappear in an hour or less. This method of electrization is doubly active, as it not only acts per se, but also through the imagination by means of the element of “ shock which it possesses. And the important influence of expectation and directed attention is well exemplified by the his¬ tory of Perkins’s metallic tractors, and all the wonders they per¬ formed, till put to silence by DrBeddoe’s bits of painted wood; or in that of the patient cured by Sir Humphry Davy of paralysis merely by having the bulb of a thermometer put under his tongue ; or in the still more curious case related by Captain Franklin of the young Cliippewayan who, having lost his wife in childbed, was enabled to nurse his boy with milk from his own breast; and we need not therefore be surprised at the occasional remarkable effects of an electric shock. To obtain this, however, in its greatest per¬ fection, we must go a little beyond Franklinization by sparks, and make use of the Leyden jar, the shock from which is so powerful that Musclienbroek, its inventor, who received this shock accidentally, wrote to Reaumur, that “ not for the kingdom of France would he expose himself to it a second time. You may therefore readily believe that shocks thus caused have occasionally produced remarkable effects, and that when passed through the larynx, though it is said that, short of being hanged, there is nothing more unpleasant, they have been extremely successful in curing nervous aphonia. A combination of several Leyden jars is called an electric battery, and may be made powerful enough to fell an ox. We can regulate to a certain extent the amount of electricity employed by means of a Lane’s electrometer, but even with every precaution the Leyden jar is the least satisfactory and most troublesome method of employing frictional electricity.