VOL. XLV.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 4^7 



Mr. W. thinks there can be no room to doubt of the assistance that medicine 

 may receive from the proper use of electricity. 



On Medical Experiments of Electricity. By Mr. Henry Baker, F. R. S. 



N°486, p. 270. 



Though perhaps as many curious and well-contrived experiments have been 

 made in England as in all the other parts of Europe, to discover the general laws 

 and properties of electricity, we have not hitherto attended to the effects that 

 may be produced by it in the bodies of living animals, any further than to assure 

 ourselves they may be killed by it; a supposition that diseases may be cured by 

 means of this power, having met with so little countenance among us, that very 

 few trials have been made, to ascertain what, in distempered cases, it can or 

 cannot perform. Foreigners, on the contrary, seem fond of believing, that the 

 subtil electric fluid (be it fire, aether, or whatever else) which can pervade all 

 bodies, and, being accumulated, even kill an animal, in certain circumstances, 

 and by certain methods of application, may possibly in other circumstances, and 

 applied in difTerent degrees, and by different methods, so operate on the fluids 

 or solids, and perhaps on both, that very beneficial and salutary effects* may 

 result from it. 



1 With this view the Abbe Nollet made several experiments on living birds, 

 kittens, and human bodies; and if we may give credit to the accounts communi- 

 cated to us, he found, in every trial, that perspiration was so considerably pro- 

 moted by it, as to cause a very sensible difference between the weight of such 

 animals as had been electrified, and others of the same kind that were treated 

 exactly alike in every respect besides; whence he naturally concludes, that in 

 cases where it is necessary to quicken the circulation of the fluids, and throw off 

 a greater quantity of the perspirable matter, electricity must be greatly useful. 



The philosophers in Italy and Germany have applied their industry to discover 

 by experiment, how far electricity may, simply and in itself, be of service in se- 

 veral diseases, and likewise how far it may conduce towards conveying the more 

 subtile and active effluvia of useful medicines, either into the whole body, or 

 into some distempered part. Some remarkable cases are related in the preceding 

 paper of the effluvia of certain substances conveyed by electricity into the body, 

 and so removing several complaints. And Dr. Joseph Bruni, one of the prin- 

 cipal physicians at, Turin, and f- r. s. has likewise sent an account of experiments 

 made at Rome and at Bologna, which are now laid before the society to show 

 what attempts to the same purpose have been made in different countries, and by 



• As is suggested by Dr. Mortimer in these Trans. N" 476". C. M. : ft 



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