International text-book of medical electro-physics and galvanism : for the use of medical students and practitioners / by William J. Herdman [and others].

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: International text-book of medical electro-physics and galvanism : for the use of medical students and practitioners / by William J. Herdman [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    The student who has been through a practical drill, such as is here outlined, will enter upon the final or tlu'vapciitical course with a prepara- tion that will insure him against innumerable blunders, and arm him with a confidence in the agent he is employing that is a guarantee to success. Therapeutics.—The student should now have the opportunity in the hospital wards, the operating-room, and the out-patient department to use the information he has already gained, and learn the value of elec- tricity in counteracting disease. Here he learns to relieve pain, to promote absorption, to quicken torpid nutritive processes, to excite secretion, to stimulate muscular action, to revive nerve inactivity, to arrest haiinorrliage, to heal ulcera- tions, to dissipate strictures and tumors, and to cauterize and destroy ab- normal growths by means of electricity in one or the other form with which he has become familiar. The therapeutical work goes hand in band with his study of pathology and diagnosis, and he learns to recog- nize the diseases most amenable to electric treatment and the method of application best adapted to each. As far as is consistent with the welfare of the patient, the student should be given the entire responsibility in carrying out the treatment when electricity has been found to be an appropriate remedy. So wide is the range of disorders now found to be helped by elec- tricity that the technique of its management in the clinic has of itself be- come a matter of so much importance, in many of our hospitals, that a special instructor is appointed to take charge of it. Under his direction the student can be well drilled in all the details of its application in a variety of diseases. The methods employed and the machinery made use of in many of our dispensaries and hospital clinics giving electric treat- ment are admirable, and the results all that could be desired, but the in- struction is oftentimes of little practical value to the student when he begins his own private work, because of his inability to duplicate or main- tain the expensive outfit with which he has been accustomed to work, or because any additional information which he may seek to obtain from other sources is couched in language which he does not clearly comprehend by reason of the difference in terms and methods of treatment adopted by those who practice electro-therapeutics. A disparity of results arises also between those who employ electricity in practice, because of a lack of uniformity in the apparatus employed. The rapid advances which all who are personally familiar with the capacities of electricity in one or other form as a curative agent know it to be capable of making are greatly retarded by this lack of uniformity in method and machinery. Electro- therapeutic apparatus can be reduced to much greater simplicity and still retain all the eflTiciency that it has been shown to possess. Primary- and secondary- current batteries, medical induction coils, milliampere- meters, rheostats, and dynamo-current controllers for medical uses should be made in accordance with standards adopted or approved by the com-