196 LOCALIZED ELECTKIZATION. 



elements, in a manner more evident in employing the ascending 

 than the descending current. 



I have tried, a very large number of times, to produce this 

 electro-muscular phenomenon, in traumatic paralysis of nerves, in 

 saturnine paralysis, and in the spinal paralysis of infancy, but I 

 have only seldom succeeded. 



I should here point out the following source of error. When 

 the contractility is considerably weakened, a time comes when the 

 muscle no longer contracts un !er the influence of the rapid inter- 

 missions of induction currents, while it still responds, in a very 

 appreciable manner, to the more distant intermissions (from one 

 to two seconds) of the same induction current. But, a great 

 number of induction instruments giving none but rapid inter- 

 missions, it has happened that on applying them to the investiga- 

 tion of electro-muscular contractility this has been supposed to be 

 abolished, while it would still have been called fortli by the slow 

 intermittences of an induction current, and even of a galvanic 

 current. It has been by proceeding in this way, there can be no 

 doubt, that experimentalists have been deceived by appearances, 

 and have been brought to believe in the frequency of the electro- 

 pathological phenomenon now under consideration. 



However this may be, I repeat that I have sometimes found 

 cases of paralysis in which the muscles no longer responded to the 

 distant intermissions of an induced current, but in which they 

 contracted more or less under the influence of the distant inter- 

 missions of a strong voltaic current, after having been traversed, 

 during from sixty to eighty seconds, by a constant continuous 

 current. 



From this special action of voltaic currents upon muscular 

 irritability, their exclusive partisans have argued to their greater 

 therapeutic power in tlie treatment of paralysis. My own expe- 

 rience shows that these pretensions are unfounded. I have even 

 seen a case of lead-palsy (for it is chiefly upon this form of disease 

 that I have made such experiments) in which the paralysed 

 muscles only contracted to the intermittences of a voltaic current, 

 but in which they gained only a little under the influence of a 

 sufficiently prolonged treatment by continuous labile and stabile 

 currents, and were then completely cured by localized faradization 

 alone. Nay, more, in the great majority of cases the lead-palsies 

 in which the muscles no longer contract either to faradization or 

 to intermittent voltaic currents, are none the less cured by the 

 former metliod of electrization. 



It is of little consequence, indeed, that one kind of electricity 

 acts more energetically than another upon the excitability or 



