HOW TO USE A
GALVANIC BATTERY IN MEDICINE
AND SURGERY.
LECTURE I.
ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS.
Mr. President and Gentlemen,
Preliminary Remarks.
When your Council did me the honour to ask me to bring before you the subject of Electro-therapeutics, I felt that the invitation was addressed rather to the Hospital to which I am attached than to myself, seeing that to it belongs the merit of having been for some years the pioneer and outpost, so to say, in this metropolis of the scientific and methodical application of electricity to the alleviation and removal of disease; and that we are indebted to one of its distinguished physicians for a remarkable investigation into animal electricity, and the demonstration that much of what we have been accustomed to attribute to a “vital principle” may, in reality, be the effect only of electrical charge and discharge[1] (a valuable contribution to the correlation of the Physical Forces); and to my predecessor for the discovery of the special influence of voltaic currents in certain forms of paralysis.[2]
As it is one of our objects in our practice here to study the scope and the limits of electricity as a remedy in disease, it seemed to me not inappropriate to devote my first Lectures to electro-therapeutics; and the more so, as few medical men have a practical knowledge of the subject; and I fear that the profession generally, through lacking this practical knowledge, are to some extent responsible for the utter and astounding recklessness with which the laity—ever ready to rush in where physicians fear to tread—are prone to apply painful and dangerous electrization, not to themselves, but to their suffering friends; while it is still too common for the medical practitioner (as quoted by Golding Bird upwards of forty years ago) to consider that when his fiat has gone forth “let the patient be electrified,” he has done all that is necessary, while the patient usually carries out this mandate by the purchase of a rotary magneto-electric machine, and by using it according to the directions of its maker, who is generally about as well fitted to teach its application in disease as is the maker of an amputating knife to operate with it!
The almost complete absence in the medical schools of the great hospitals of opportunities for an adequate study of electro-therapeutics, the importance of the subject, and the widespread attention that it is awakening throughout the profession, have also determined me to sketch as briefly as is consistent with clearness the present position of the science and practice of medical electricity, and especially of its practice.[3]
Electricity, Gentlemen, is by no means one of those remedies that, failing to do good, is little likely to do harm. On the contrary, in injudicious hands, it is potent for evil, while the benefit to be derived from it is in exact proportion to the judgment and care with which it is administered. Moreover, the results of its employment are dependent, more than with any other therapeutic agency, upon the methods by which it is applied—methods that should be familiar, not alone to a few specialists, but to every practitioner.