The value of electrical treatment / by Julius Althaus.

  • Althaus, Julius, 1833-1900.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The value of electrical treatment / by Julius Althaus. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of Study and teaching in most English hospitals, which was not the case twenty years ago ; while in Germany and the United States almost every practitioner makes daily use of both the constant and intermittent current in his treatment of disease. If electricity could not accomplish more than Perkin's metallic tractors, or other imaginative thera- peutical agents, it may be taken for granted that it would long ago have disappeared from practice. Having been in intimate touch with this subject during a long professional life, it has, under the circumstances just mentioned, appeared to me worth while to submit once more to the profession my views on the uses and the limits of usefulness of electricity in medicine. * * # # Forms of Electricity. The principal forms of electricity which are at present utilised in medical practice, are :— I. —Electricity in the state of rest, franklinism, frictional, or static electricity. II. —Current electricity, or electricity in the state of motion, which comprehends the following varieties :— 1. Galvanism, the continuous or constant galvanic, or voltaic, or battery current. 2. The constant current from the main, which is pro- duced by the ordinary constant current dynamo of comparatively low tension, and which, although always flowing in the same direction, is not as uniform in strength or smooth in its action as the battery current. 3. Faradism, electro-magnetism, the interrupted inter- mittent, induced, or faradic current. 4. (TArsonval's tmdulating or sinusoidal current, which always flows in the same direction, but attains its position and negative maximum gradually, so that, while incessantly varying from one instant to B 2