THERAPEUTIC VALUE OF LOCALIZED FARADIZATION. 149 



tion has been applied very recently, in the hospitals of Philadelphia, 

 to the treatment of tranmatic paralysis, by surgeons specially 

 selected by Mr. Hammond, the chief surgeon of the army of the 

 North, and in the cases of men wounded in the civil war. The 

 following are the terms in which the therapeutic results of this 

 method of localized electrization have been described by these 

 distinguished men. 'The only important means,' they say, "in 

 the treatment of paralysis arising from default of innervation, is 

 faradization by the method of M. Duchenne. . . . Most 

 of our cases were from wounds that were of old standing when 

 they came under our care. We can assure you that localized 

 faradization has, in our hands, been of the utmost value. In some 

 cases it has, at a single apj)lication, restored the power of move- 

 ment to parts that had been long deprived of it ; in others, a few 

 applications have more or less completely restored the power of 

 movement to an entire limb ; and we have seen very few instances 

 in which there has not been improved nutrition, and greater sen- 

 sibility and strength, when we were able to continue the faradiza- 

 tion sufficiently long. In a word, we cannot too strongly repeat 

 that, until faradization has been used, no limb, however completely 

 paralysed, should be abandoned by the surgeon as incurable.' " ' 



I might also adduce other kinds of paralysis, in which the lesion 

 of nutrition is equally profound, and in which localized faradization 

 is often successful. Moreover, clinical facts will be hereafter 

 detailed, which ]3rove incontestably the favourable — I would almost 

 say the marvellous — influence of localized faradization upon the 

 nutrition and the motility of muscles. These facts will be found 

 in the chapters specially devoted to the application of this method 

 of electrization to traumatic paralysis of nerves, to paralysis con- 

 secutive to myelitis in adults and adolescents, to saturnine and 

 rheumatic paralysis. We shall even see that, when applied to the 

 fatty atrophic — spinal— paralysis of infancy, localized faradization 

 acts not only upon the nutrition of the muscles, but also upon that 

 of the entire limb, so that it prevents arrest of development of the 

 bone. 



§ II. Critical examinaiion of the' electro-jyliysiologieal experiments 

 which have served as the foiindation of the attacks recently directed 

 against the therapeutic value of localized faradization. Their 

 inexactitude. 



Although, during more than twenty years, I have obtained from 

 localized faradization such results as I have described, and after I 



' S. Weir Mitchell, George E. More- I Wounds and other injuries of Nerves.' 

 house, and William W. Keen, ' fiuiishot | Philadelphia, 1868. 



