180 LOCALIZED ELECTRIZATIOK 



possible length of nerve in the circuit, and although I employed a 

 powerful and very painful current, I must still declare, that I have 

 seen nothing but the involuntary movements of flexion or exten- 

 sion of the fingers or the hand, and sometimes flexion of the fore- 

 arm upon the arm, such as were produced in my former experi- 

 ments, and which are due to the intolerable pain that is sometimes 

 caused by the local action of the rheophores upon the skin. 

 Remak knows so well that these instinctive movements occur 

 during the experiment, that he has written, "It is, of a truth, 

 difficult for many persons to abstain from calling into play their 

 volition, and to leave the action exempt from the influence of 

 such innervation, engendered at the moment of entrance of the 

 current." * 



I wished, like other persons present at my clinical lectures, and 

 who yielded themselves to the experiment, to nerve myself against 

 the pain, and to prevent involuntary movement ; but then we did 

 not witness, in the muscles subject to the antagonist of the excited 

 nerve, the so-called galvano-tonic contractions of Remak. On 

 one occasion only, in one of these experiments, we observed that 

 the contraction of the moment of completion was prolonged in the 

 muscles supplied by the excited median nerve ; but this phe- 

 nomenon is not so new to science as has been said. 



" The production of galvano-tonic contractions," says Remak, 

 " is commonly promoted by the same circumstances which facili- 

 tate the contraction on completing the circuit, — that is, a sudden 

 and prompt application of the rheophores over the nerves." I 

 have observed, indeed, that the movements of the hand and of the 

 fingers, which take place at the moment when the circuit is com- 

 pleted, sometimes continue, but only for a very short time. (This 

 phenomenon had previously been observed by Ritter.) Under such 

 circumstances there is certainly a complication of phenomena ; 

 that is, the contraction due to the completion of the circuit, and 

 the contraction caused by the pain, or that which is produced, 

 according to Remak, by the passage of the current. 



In order to avoid the contraction at the completion of the 

 circuit, I have caused the current to pass through a thick stratum 

 of liquid, in such a manner that the completion produced no 

 contraction ; then I have progressively increased the tension of the 

 current, until it attained its maximum ; and, if I prevented the 

 instinctive movements occasioned by the pain, I never perceived 

 any contractions excepting those fibrillar or oscillatory ones already 

 mentioned, and which are probably occasioned by those inequali- 



* Bemak, Galvanotherapie, p. 56. 



