Abstract
Contemporary psychiatry requires a clearer interrelation of scientific and practical medicine. This paper is an attempt to bring observable evidence into the realm of bedside nursing and safe scientific methods.
The personal study of many hundreds of E.C.T.s has been undertaken with the aim of clarifying the phenomenon of the clonus phase, defining and studying it in its phase-sequence so that some understanding can be reached as to what is normal clonus.
Organically-healthy patients suffering from depressive psychoses were studied under ordinary bedside conditions. In some instances, the clonus events were automatically recorded to confirm the existence of clinically-observable evidence, such as the march of onset and cessation of the clonus in different anatomical locations.
A clinical and statistical category of the E.C.T. phases was established. The clonus phase was defined and set into this category. The characteristics were enumerated and described. The clonus phase was taken as a total event with its times of appearances and anatomical sequences, the increments and decrements of frequencies, intrinsities and symmetrical distributions.
The evidence was collated, discussed and a unifying process proposed.