236 LOCALIZED ELECTRIZATION. 



ments which they execute or which are impressed upon their limbs. 

 They feel blows which affect the deeper tissues ; and their feet, 

 when resting upon the ground, appear to them as if placed upon 

 a soft surface, such as that of a carpet. We also see them stamp 

 upon the ground in walking, so as to feel it better. If they are at 

 the same time deprived of the cutaneous, the muscular, and the 

 articular sensibility, and if the bones are also insensitive (a con- 

 dition the existence of which I have ascertained by electric excita- 

 tion of the osseous surfaces), they do not feel even the most violent 

 blows, they have no consciousness of their movements, they cannot 

 maintain an upright posture, except by looking at the ground which 

 they have ceased to feel ; and, in bed, they are unconscious of 

 their limbs, unless they see them. 



(Jase XVIII. — I have seen, iu La Charite, a patient comiiletely anfesthetic 

 and analgesic, who felt as if she were suspended in the air when she ceased 

 to see the bed on which she was i^laced. This caused her continual terrors 

 at the moment of falling asleeji ; for, not seeing the bed, she believed herself 

 in danger of falling, and could not be re-assured until she had ascertained by 

 sight that she was actually lying upon a solid bed. 



The most intense induction currents are powerless against these 

 profound lesions of sensibility, unless their intermissions succeed 

 each other with great rapiility. The patient above referred to 

 had suffered from general insensibility for many weeks ; and was 

 very quickly cured by currents of rapid intermission, the re-com- 

 position of which was effected in the muscles, the nerves, and the 

 bones. I should add that I had previously faradized her with 

 slow intermissions, but with no benefit, the power of the instru- 

 ment being at its maximum. 



It is especially in that common affection, cutaneous anaesthesia, 

 that rapid intermissions are necessary in order to obtain the 

 therapeutic influence of the induced currents ; without them we 

 should fail nearly always, notwithstanding the use of the current 

 of the second coil, graduated to the maximum. 



(c). I have employed, in therapeutics, the singular property 

 possessed by rapid induced currents of increasing the power of 

 muscular tonicity, a force which never sleeps. It is this tonic 

 force which, in the absence of voluntary contractions, forms the 

 physiognomy, and maintains the natural attitudes of the limbs ; 

 and which, if diminished or increased, will disarrange their ad- 

 mirably combined mechanism, as happens in muscular pathology. 

 This, indeed, shows us the correctness of these assertions ; we then 

 see the muscles contract, or lose more or less of their tonic force ; 

 they are springs which have either become tense or have relaxed 

 themselves ; if I may be pardoned the use of a comparison that is 



