Electricity in its relations to practical medicine / by Moritz Meyer.
- Meyer, Moritz, 1821-1893.
- Date:
- 1874, ©1869
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Electricity in its relations to practical medicine / by Moritz Meyer. 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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![THIRD SECTION. OF THE ELECTRO-MOTOR PROPERTIES OF THE ANIMAL BODY. E. Du Bois-Reymond, Untersuchungen fiber thierische Electrieitat, vol. i. and ii., 1848, 1849. C. Ludwig, Lehrbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, vol. i., 1852, pp. 316, et seg. C. Eckhard, Grundziige der Physiologie des Nerven- systems, 1854, pp. 40, et set], A. Fick, die medicinische Physik, 1856, pp. 411, etseq. [Morgan, Electro-Physiology and Therapeutics, etc., New York, 1868.] In order to have a clear understanding of the changes produced by the action of the electric current on the various animal tissues, we shall, in this chapter, speak of the in- herent currents that are present in the animal body, as well as of the changes the tissues undergo in their molecular arrangement, during the production and action of the elec- tric current. ISobili, in 1827, discovered an electric current in the frog, the so-called frog-current, which he—starting on the supposi- tion that nerves, on account of their small mass when com- pared with the muscles, cool more rapidly through evapora- tion—mistook for a thermo-electric current. Subsequently Matteucci corrected this mistake, as well as the error that the current is of electro-chemical origin, and proved that the connection of the two points in the long axis of the frog, of which, however, only one must be on the trunk of the ani- mal, shows the presence of an inherent electric current flow- ing in the same direction. E. Du Bois-Reymond, however, was the first to succeed in demonstrating the presence of specific muscle and nerve currents, by the deflection of the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21013408_0057.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
