The student's manual of medical electricity : showing its most scientific and rational application to all forms of acute and chronic disease, by the different combinations of electricity, galvanism, electro-magnetism, magneto-electricity, and human magnetism / by William White.

  • White, William M.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The student's manual of medical electricity : showing its most scientific and rational application to all forms of acute and chronic disease, by the different combinations of electricity, galvanism, electro-magnetism, magneto-electricity, and human magnetism / by William White. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    SO far as we can gain a knowledge of it. Little more than the common instincts which characterize animals seem to have been his. Yet he was more than they ; for he combined with all they had, some peculiar forms of being which they possessed not. Nature's experiments never failed: she had com- menced his life in the lowest life; and she had carried that particular part of her work through all, perfecting it more and more as she developed higher and higher beings; adding each time some new feature that should show her progress. In some of the lowest, which were fish, she had commenced the spinal column, that by and by was to bear erect man's head, with its lofty intellect, and power of reason. Again, in another, she shaped the internal ear, which now adds so much to his pleasure. How diligently she labored; for, as one part after another was formed, she gathered them together in some new expression, with ever something new added. Not only do we trace the work in the animal kingdom, but away back through the vegetable and mineral. She had commenced her work by chemical and electrical laws, putting together certain chemical prop- erties to produce certain effects, and governing them by the electrical laws of polarity. Never once did she mistake her method or its result; but each trial brought something beyond the preceding. Man's de- velopment was slow, and yet how certain. The first we know of him may be comparatively little, yet that little enough to show us how much superior the human was to all Nature's previous works.