festations
dating back upwards of a year. When I first saw him, the choreic
movements were so continuous and violent as to preclude the
possibility of administering electric baths. The attempt was
indeed made; but no sooner had we managed to place the boy in
the tub, than he splashed the water freely about, and by the
violence of his movements bid fair to injure himself. I
therefore deferred for a time the electro-balneological
treatment, and had course to ordinary spinal galvanizations.
These, together with internal medication--which Dr. K. attended
to--had by the 8th of October diminished sufficiently the
violence of the movements to admit of the administration of the
baths. Accordingly the local applications were discontinued, and
from Oct. 8th to Nov. 27th the boy had seventeen baths, when,
all traces of the disease having disappeared, treatment was
discontinued.

HYSTERICAL AFFECTIONS.

If there is any one disease that more frequently than any other tempts
the physician to have recourse to empirical treatment, it surely is
hysteria. The obscurity, in many cases, of its etiology, as well as its
frequent obstinacy under the most diverse methods of treatment,
successively employed, are alone sufficient to warrant us in having
recourse to electricity, where this has not already been employed.
Where we can establish the etiology of a given case, we cannot of course
be in doubt as to the remedy; and in many instances of this kind we find
in electricity our most potent curative agent. But even where we are in
doubt or positively ignorant as to the origin of the symptoms, we are
justified in giving preference empirically to electricity, not only
because, the disease being essentially of a nervous character, we find
in electricity the most powerful of neurotics, but also because _recent_
statistics, those that embrace a period when electricity has been
permitted to participate, if not duly, at least more largely than
heretofore, in the treatment of disease, go to show that by means of
this remedy better average results have been obtained than with any
other. Again, where there are no positive indications to employ any
special method of electrization, either central or local, it appears
rational to give the preference to a method that is at the same time
central and peripheral, that admits of the application of either current
with the ut