been acquainted with medical electricity. This is that mantle of charity I have cast over the faculty, (vide c. 2, p. 62.) Nothing but a want of information on the subject of medical electricity, can exculpate physicians from a crime, dark as the grave, and horrid as murder! But there is no contradictions in my prescriptions of this specific, of its being capable of removing a diabetes, by duly mixing the substances of the blood, and attenuating the fluids generally, and affecting the whole round of secretions, and promoting a due degree of action upon them all; and consequently of secreting the perspirable vapour. These united productions must check a profusion from the blood in the kidneys, and so restore a diabetes. And as to suppression of urine by strangury, irritation or spasm, or any kind of obstruction (excepting the stone or gravel) either upon the ureters or the urethra, the dilation of the shock, its attending effect, is equal to the removal of obstructions of one description; and its stimulating fractional warmth and rarifaction is equal to another. And as to a deficient action in the kidneys, in secreting from the blood a due quantity of urine, this is again a deficiency of secretion; and the same remedy that cures a diabetes, by acting upon the secretory vessels, will also, by the same actions, restore a deficiency of sensation in the kidneys. I am not the only one who has discovered the power of the electric shocks, over a deficiency of secretions. Dr. Cavallo asserts, that the shocks promote secretions universally. Certainly they must have this effect, inasmuch as they do mix, attenuate and rarify the whole mass of fluids, and, at the fame time, expand and dilate the minute vessels, every where in the system: being conducted, as hath been demonstrated, through the vessels every where, in every part where there is fluids to conduct, this subtle effluvia will fly and expand, dilate and attenuate upon the whole mass of fluids, and thro'out the whole vascular system. Who can but exclaim, what a mean of health! what a preservation of life has been ignorantly prostituted to mere amusement!

N. B. I have been credibly informed, that when a stone, which had been extracted from the urinary bladder, had been put into a vessel of Ballston pool water, or that of Saratoga pool, which is similar, that the mineral proved a resolvent upon the stone, and dissolved it in a short time: but there is need of caution in using the water in such cases. During a summer which I spent at Ballston pool, a man living in that place asked my opinion concerning the use of electricity, and of the pool water, for the stone in the bladder: I replied, that electricity was useless, and that the mineral was such a powerful diuretic, that I thought there was danger of pressing the stone into the neck of the bladder, and might have a bad tendency; at any rate, the water ought to be used moderately.

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