The relation of electro-therapeutics to electrophysiology / by A.D. Rockwell.

  • A. D. Rockwell
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The relation of electro-therapeutics to electrophysiology / by A.D. Rockwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    It would In- exceedingly ungracious, not to say absurd, for me or for any one to underrate the impor- tance rjf a scientific study of electro-therapeutics, or to speak of electro-physiology as of little account in its relations to the former. I fully appreciate the im- mense aid that the important discoveries in electro- physiology have thus far afforded to the electro-thi ra- peutist, but I do most decidedly object to that narrow- ness of view whieli refuses to accept a clinical fact, because it does not seem perfectly adjusted in its re- lations to known physiological laws. If electro-therapeutics is in advance of electro-phy- siology, as it would certainly appear, we yet know that there are laws in electro-physiology yet to he dis- covered; that in all department- >f -eienee, fart-tin' observed long before a solution is found for them, and that here as elsewhere, we should no more hesitate to accept well-authenticated therapeutical results, because an explanation is not readily found in physi- ology, than we should hesitate to accept any truth of science in general, because its satisfactory explanation is not immediately at hand. In order to estimate the value of electro-physiology as a guide to the study of electro-therapeutics, .and to form some conception of just how far it should tyran- nize over and hold in check our clinical experiment-, and the conclusions to be drawn from them, it is well on the one hand to examine in a general way some of tlio most important known principles of electro-phy- siology, and on the other to briefly consider the main methods of application. More than a century litis elapsed since the first ex- perimental attempts to determine the degree of excita- bility of the cerebral hemispheres to the electric stimu- lus, and although Bailer and Zinn had in 1756 re- ferred to convulsive movements that followed irritation of the medullary substance of the brain, the universal testimony of all experimenters, up to 1870. was that the brain could not be excited by our ordinary meth- ods of stimulation. Very recently Fritsch and Hitzig, usinj; the constant current, followed by Ferrierusing the faradic. claimed to have discovered Localized centres of movement in the brain—thus merely unearthing as it were the idea
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