| Socrates |
Aristotle |
Plato |
Rene
Descartes |
Luigi
Galvani |
William
James |
Sigmund
Freud |
Carl
Jung |
Luigi Galvani (1737-1798)
Galvani
was
born in Bologna, Italy on the 9th of September, 1737. He originally
intented to study theology and to enter a monastic order, but he later
decided to study the natural sciences. He started his work as an
anatomist and physiologist with his thesis on the nature and formation
of the bones and was appointed public lecturer at the University of
Bologna and at the age of twenty-five. In 1780 he started his famous
experiments on electric charges and frogs at the University of Bologna. He
observed that if a charge was applied to the spinal cord of a frog, it
could generate muscular spasms throughout its body, even if the legs
were no longer attached to a frog. This was discovered accidentally
while Galvani was cutting a frog leg and his steel scalpel touched a
brass hook that was holding the leg in place and the leg twitched. He
conducted further experiments to confirm this effect, using electric current delivered by a Leyden jar or a
rotating static electricity generator. Galvani's remarkable discovery was largely responsible for establishing the basis for the biological study of neurophysiology and
neurology. Nerves were no longer
regarded as water pipes or channels, as Descartes and his contemporary
believed, but instead as electrical conductors. This showed that
information within the nervous system was carried by electrical
circuits generated within the organic tissue. The
relationship of chemistry, biology and electricity became the topic of
scholarly discussion and perhaps
encouraged investigation on medical electricity.The new field of
"bioelectrogenesis" was then established and the electrical nature of the
nerve-muscle function was the topic of interest. A direct proof could not be made until
scientists could measure or detect the natural electrical currents
generated in the nervous and muscular cells. Galvani could not do this
since the technology to measure these minuscule currents did not exist
as yet.
