It would be interesting for the reader were I to continue to cite different diseases in which electricity has been successfully employed, but that would require a systematic arrangement of the subject, which would be incompatible with the original purpose of this book. I simply desire to awaken an interest in a comparatively new remedial agent, in its present field of employment. There may be a great many ways to get relief, but that course which offers the least risk to _life_ and the least suffering to the _living_ is the one that should recommend itself to the sufferer. What patients need is not brilliant surgical exploits to make the reputation of an ambitious operator, but the conscientious aid of the conservative physician who is content to labor in the less pretentious capacity of an assistant to nature’s curative energy. CHAPTER XXVI. SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS OF PREGNANCY. PREGNANCY is the condition in which the female has within her an impregnated, _fecundated_ germ, which gradually becomes developed in or out of the womb. In a perfectly normal state of things, the impregnated ovum becomes attached to the inner surface of the womb by virtue of a preordained vital force by which the ovum becomes animated at the moment of conception. It obtains its nutrition from a plexus of blood vessels, by means of which the ovum is attached to the inner side of the walls of the uterus, and this complex of vessels grows with the development of the fetus, and constitutes the _placenta_, which, together with the membranes and the umbilical cord, is called the afterbirth. The growth of the embryo, which is the predestined child in the mother’s womb, occupies a period of ten lunar months, or two hundred and eighty days—this is the average term of pregnancy, although the duration of pregnancy is prolonged in a large proportion of cases to three hundred days, and even longer, while in a small proportion of pregnant women the period of gestation falls naturally shorter than two hundred and eighty days. In a small number of pregnancies the impregnated ovum is arrested at the ovary, or on its passage from the latter through the Fallopian tubes; it then does not arrive in the cavity of the uterus. This state of things is unnatural, hence termed _preternatural_, because the growth of the fetus takes place out of the uterus, and this is also called _extrauterine_ pregnancy, which may take place in the ovary, Fallopian tubes, or cavity of the abdomen. False pregnancy implies that there was no pregnancy at all, or in other words, that there was no fetus, and that the enlargement was due to something else.