110 Dr. A. P. W. Philip on the 
which have been referred to be correct, it is reasonable to sup- 
pose that they may be beneficially applied to the practice of 
medicine. The view of the different functions of the animal 
body, and their mutual dependence on each other afforded by 
those experiments, cannot, in that case, fail to be of use in ex- 
plaining the nature and regulating the treatment of the deviations 
of these functions from the healthy state, particularly in the 
diseases whose symptoms are most influenced by the mutual 
sympathy of the vital organs. 
In a Treatise on Indigestion, I have attempted its application 
to an extensive class of these diseases. But I here wish chiefly 
to direct the reader’s attention to the practical results from the 
experiments which relate to the influence of galvanism on the 
animal body. . 
They led me more than six years ago to the employment of 
this agent in diseases, which seem to arise from a defect of 
nervous power, particularly habitual asthma and indigestion ; 
and an account of its effects in those diseases was published in 
the Philosophical Transactions of 1817. It is now admitted, I 
believe, by all who have witnessed them, that in the former 
disease, and under certain circumstances of the latter, galvanism 
is the most effectual means of relief which we possess. 
In its employment, we must constantly guard against 
the inflammatory diathesis, both because it tends to produce 
this diathesis, and because the diseases to which it is 
adapted, for reasons pointed out at length in the Treatise on In- 
digestion, to which I have just referred, have the same tendency. 
As any considerable degree of the inflammatory diathesis not 
only obviates the beneficial effects of galvanism, but renders it 
injurious, the constant superintendence of a well-informed prac- 
titioner is necessary. 1 need not here enter more particularly 
into this part of the subject, which has been done in that trea- 
tise, and in my Experimental Inquiry into the Laws of the Vital 
Functions, in which the reader will find a detail of cases cured, 
or relieved by galvanism. ‘To its effects in one case of consider- 
able importance I shall beg leave more particularly to direct the 
reader’s attention, because it is only since I last had occasion to 
