The patient is naturally a little shocked when the cold towel is first applied, but the unpleasantness is only momentary, and then the reaction brings ease and comfort, so that she desires the ice bags to be renewed quite often at first, for the patient has now found a remedy that relieves the pain as nothing else has ever done before. When the towels become dry and hot, the painful symptoms return, so that they should be dipped four to six times in the twenty-four hours. If the sensitiveness on pressure and other indications denote that the acute inflammatory process is checked, then the compresses and ice may be discontinued. This treatment avoids suppuration and the formation of abscesses, while hot applications encourage them. A mild stimulating diet of milk and egg punch with ten to fifteen grains of quinine each day should be given in all infectious inflammations. CHAPTER XXV. ELECTRICITY AS A REMEDY. IN a brief reference to the medical virtues of electricity in the treatment of diseases of women, only an outline of its physics can be given, so as to give the reader an approximate idea of its origin and phenomena. The use that is being made of electricity in the arts has convinced everybody that it is a most powerful agent, which manifests itself in so many different phenomena that it is as mysterious to-day as it was centuries before Christ, when the Greeks first observed it in amber when rubbed with silk, and from which the term has been derived. Electricity is developed in bodies from a variety of causes, among which are friction, pressure, chemical action, heat, and magnetism. We are acquainted with it only through the peculiarity of its action, and it behaves as a subtile, imponderable fluid of a compound nature, possessing opposite polarity when excited, giving rise to positive and negative electricities, but when at rest these forces seem to neutralize each other, and as such pervade all matter. Chemical action is usually the most convenient for obtaining electricity for medicinal purposes, and the arrangement through which this is accomplished is called a cell or battery. A battery in its simplest construction is made of a plate of zinc and a plate of copper partially immersed in dilute sulphuric acid. A disturbance of the neutral electricity now ensues, and by means of a delicate instrument, it may be observed that the zinc plate possesses a feeble charge of negative and the copper a feeble charge of positive electricity; at the same time there is a slight escape of hydrogen from the surface of the zinc. If now the plates are connected by means of a metallic wire, the chemical action increases and the hydrogen gas is now discharged from the surface of the copper. The wire is now traversed by an electric or voltaic current, which imparts to the connecting wire, thermal, magnetic and other properties. [Illustration: PLATE V.