Volume 23 — GALVANISM CANNOT RESTORE EXHAUSTED VITALITY.

Dr. B. W. Richardson says that artificial respiration is a much more effective means of restoring the drowned or asphyxiated than galvanism. By the use of an intermittent current of galvanism it is possible to make the respiratory muscles of an animal recently dead act in precise imitation of life, and the heart can be excited into brisk contraction by the same means. But the result was that "the muscles excited by the current dropped quickly into irrevocable death through becoming exhausted under the stimulus, and that in fact the galvanic battery, according to our present knowledge of its use in these cases, is an all but certain instrument of death. By subjecting animals to death from the vapor of chloroform in the same atmosphere, and treating one set by artificial respiration with the double-acting pump, and the other set by artificial respiration excited by galvanism, I found that the first would recover in the proportion of five out of six, the second in proportion of one out of six. Further, I found that if during the performance of mechanical artificial respiration the heart were excited by galvanism, death is all but invariable." This results from the fact that "the passage of a galvanic current through the muscles of a body recently dead confers on those muscles no new energy; that the current in its passage only excites temporary contraction; that the force of contraction resident in the muscles themselves is but educed by the excitation, and to strike the life out of the muscles by the galvanic shock without feeding the force, expended by contraction, from the centre of the body, is a fatal principle of practice."