I have formed a theory as to the _rationale_ of this influence, which I
will offer as its probable explanation. We all know that sleep is a
process designed by nature for the recuperation of the system after a
certain period of activity. In other words, when the various functions
have been more or less exercised for their daily allotted time—say
seventeen hours—the respective organs need that profound rest which we
know as sleep. Now, it is pretty well conceded by physiologists, that
electricity stimulates the secretory as well as excretory organs; that
it furthers endosmosis and exosmosis—by its electrolytic influence in a
physical, by its influence on the nervous system in a catalytic manner,
in short, and by virtue of these properties, that it greatly
ENHANCES THE CHANGE OF MATTER
and incites the various organs to so great an activity as to cause them
to perform in a comparatively brief space of time—say an hour, the work
of several hours. The natural sequence is obvious: _The want of rest—of
sleep, is felt at a correspondingly earlier period._ I offer this as a
probable explanation of the immediate or almost immediate disposition to
sleep. As to the permanent improvement in sleep, where this has been
below the normal standard, it must always be due to the removal of some
morbid condition, and thus belongs among therapeutic results, rather
than physiological effects. It is true that in many instances of
_agrypnia_ we are unable to discover any pathological condition that
would account for this symptom; but the probability is that here there
is a sluggishness of some one or more of the functions, mental or
physical, too obscurely manifested to be discovered by our present means
of diagnosis, yet reached and rectified by a mode of electrization that
traverses and permeates _every_ portion of the body.
If this explanation of the hypnotic effect of the electric bath be not
the true one, it is at least—so far as I know—the first attempt at
accounting for a phenomenon that has been noticed as a result of even
local applications of electricity by many observers, and about the
pretty uniform occurrence of which there can be no doubt.
With respect to the effect on the
TEMPERATURE AND PULSE,
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