United States or Somalia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


And because two positives repel each other, and also because the direction of the current is always from the positive to the negative pole, carrying the electro-vital fluid with it, either I must withdraw my positive electrode, or that excess of electro-vitality in the diseased part which makes it morbidly positive, and thus produces inflammation, must give way.

The positive pole repels the excess of electro-vitality away from the positive spleen, and so reduces the improper excitement there, while at the same time it rushes, by attraction, to the negative liver, under the negative pole, and makes that more positive, and so more active. In this way, I change the polarization of the parts, and, in so doing, remove the sustaining cause of the disease.

On the other hand, if there be found a part evincing much less than the usual sensibility found in the healthy corresponding part of other patients, it may safely be pronounced torpid or paralytic, more or less. It lacks sufficient electro-vitality is improperly negative, and needs to be treated with the negative pole.

As to the vegetable kingdom, there is here, so far as we can discover, only a duality of principle, viz: the material body and a modified phase of electro-vitality. These component parts appear to sustain to each other, in the vegetable, relations quite analogous to those of the corresponding parts in the animal.

Malignant cholera, which is eminently acute, might by some be considered as an exception. In negative diseases, there is a low degree of electro-vitality.

These nerve-centers, viewed as magnets of electro-vitality, require to be regarded as having each a positive nucleus in the interior, on which are ranged the negative ends of the currents which go out from this positive nucleus in every direction to the surface of the medullary organ so radiating, as it were, from center to periphery.

You here perceive that I treat a positive part with the positive pole, so as to repel the excess of electro-vitality from it, and thus repress its excessive action; and that I treat a negative part with the negative pole, so as to attract the electro-vital fluid, along with the current from the machine, to it from under the positive pole, and thus increase the action by making it more positive.

Do you not see that, by placing my negative pole on the already overcharged and inflamed eyes, I attract to them yet more of the electro-vital fluid, and so increase their positive condition and aggravate the inflammation? and that, by presenting my positive electrode to the eyes already more or less paralyzed, I repel what little electro-vitality there was there, and so make the nerves all the more negative and dead?

I choose to term it electro-vital fluid, or electro-vitality. My reasons for so designating it are the following: It is demonstrably electrical in its nature. It appears to be identified, or at least connected immediately, with the vitalization of the body. I wish, by its name, to distinguish it from mental vitality, or the vitality of spirit.

If a limb be paralyzed, by interrupting in any way the flow of the electro-vital fluid through its nerves, and thus depriving the mind of its medium of communication with it, you may burn that limb to a crisp and the subject will feel no pain. When you burn your finger or break your arm, you disturb the action of the electro-vitality in the injured part, deranging its poles.