“The Electrical Resistance of the Human Body”

Abstract

WILL you kindly publish the inclosed from Prof. Dolbear? It furnishes a complete explanation of the discrepancy between his measurements of the resistance of the human body and those which I have recently made. At the same time, as I have pointed out to him, the fact that this resistance may sink below 500 ohms with “soaked skin,” even if that be “abnormal,” is of the highest physiological importance, and goes far to explain the hitherto mysterious deaths from accidental passage of a current through the body. Most of these, as Prof. Forbes remarked to me, have taken place with alternate, not continuous, current machines.