, and so
effects a cure.

_Neuralgic affections_ are frequently found difficult, or even
impossible, to be cured by means of medicines, and yet, in the very same
cases, these affections yield and disappear with comparative facility
when brought under the electric current, judiciously applied, according
to the principles of this new system.

_Chronic cases, and others of an asthenic character_, are often very
stubborn under the medicines of pharmacy, and are commonly the dread of
physicians; yet, under scientific treatment by electricity, they rarely
fail to lose their formidable character and to become obedient to the
remedial agent.

_Fourth._--In enumerating a few of the peculiar advantages of this
system, I should add that it corrects the usual _electric_ practice of
the profession, so far as they become acquainted with it. As before
intimated, the mass of physicians at present, who treat more or less
electrically, do so with no knowledge, or next to none, of the great
_versatility_ of action of which the electric current is capable. They
know nothing of the electrical polarization of the living organism in
health, nor how it is variously affected in disease. The particular
_electrical_ state of the diseased organs is a matter foreign to their
minds. They appear to suppose the point to be immediately aimed at as a
means of cure is to get the electricity from the machine into the
affected part or parts; whereas it should be to change, by correction,
the _polarization_ of the part or parts; and, if there be virus present,
to neutralize that. Equally unacquainted are they generally with the
diverse physiological action of the several modifications of the
electric force--galvanism, magnetism, faradism, and frictional
electricity. This, in their candor, they commonly acknowledge. And, for
the most part, they are little or nothing better acquainted with the
_distinctive_ effects on the system of the positive and negative poles
of the instrument. There is, therefore, plainly no _science_ in their
electrical practice. Every thing is done at random--all is empirical.

But the system here taught opens the light upon all of these points. For
practical purposes, at least, it is, in its essential features, the only
system of electrical therapeutics which has in it any real merit--the
only system which _can be true_. By this, the writer does not mean to
assert, or to imply, that the little book now before the reader contains