Neurasthenia / by Gilbert Ballet ; translated from the third French edition by P. Campbell Smith.

Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Neurasthenia / by Gilbert Ballet ; translated from the third French edition by P. Campbell Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    twelve minutes. The first applications are badly borne in general, but tolerance is soon established, and this mode of treatment frequently produces excellent results. In the treatment of these cases of genital atony, one may also apply local galvanisation according to the method of Benedikt and Schultz. A weak current is used ; the positive pole is held over the upper lumbar vertebrae, and the negative is moved over the perineum, the spermatic cords, and the penis in succession. The application is continued for from three to four minutes and is repeated every day or every second day. Fara- disation seems more efficacious; all the accessible muscles of the perineum are faradised in succes- sion, and especially the bulbo-cavernosi, or else one of the poles is placed in the rectum and the other on the perineum and the root of the penis. The action of these local methods of treatment must of course be seconded by putting into operation the various hygienic measures that are required in the general treatment of neurasthenic conditions. As to pure traumatic neurasthenia it does not appear to us to offer any special therapeutic indications. The treatment of this etiological variety of nervous exhaustion differs in no essential point from that of cerebro-spinal neurasthenia in general.