Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience

Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience

Marco Piccolino

Language: English

Pages: 400

ISBN: 0199782164

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


"... and still we could never suppose that fortune were to be so friendly to us, such as to allow us to be perhaps the first in handling, as it were, the electricity concealed in nerves, in extracting it from nerves, and, in some way, in putting it under everyone's eyes."

With these words, Luigi Galvani announced to the world in 1791 his discovery that nervous conduction and muscle excitation are electrical phenomena. The result of more than years of intense experimental work, Galvani's milestone achievement concluded a thousand-year scientific search, in a field long dominated by the antiquated beliefs of classical science. Besides laying the grounds for the development of the modern neurosciences, Galvani's discovery also brought to light an invention that would forever change humankind's everyday life: the electric battery of Alessandro Volta.
In an accessible style, written for specialists and general readers alike, Shocking Frogs retraces the steps of both scientific discoveries, starting with the initial hypotheses of the Enlightenment on the involvement of electricity in life processes. So doing, it also reveals the inconsistency of the many stereotypes that an uncritical cultural tradition has imparted to the legacies of Galvani and Volta, and proposes a decidedly new image of these monumental figures.

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Science. Caldani and Fontana replied to Laghi’s criticism of Haller by accusing their older colleague of neglect with respect to the experimental method: “This savant—Caldani wrote—very well knows how dangerous it is to assert such important facts without having any evidence; this would mean to open the door to all the imaginary structures that the producers of systems need” (Caldani, 1757, p. 465). It was indeed a serious accusation against a person like Laghi, who belonged to the Bolognese.

Galvani’s investigation—so the story goes—was the observation of contractions at a distance, when he observed the movements of a frog’s leg coincident with a spark being extracted from the electrical machine and with no material connection between the animal and the instrument. This observation was followed, some 5 years later, by a second crucial experiment, that is, the possibility of producing muscular contractions by connecting the nerve and muscle of a “prepared” frog through a metal arc.

Instruments, a pneumatic pump and several chemical apparatuses, and other objects appear in the inventory of Galvani’s collection of scientific instruments, which was acquired at the beginning of the twentieth century by Henry Wellcome for his museum. This collection, which includes also instruments from a later era like some batteries, is now kept in stock at the Science Museum in London, where it Artificial Electricity, the Spark, and the Nervous Fluid j 73 figure 4.1. Original watercolor.

Contractions. From this point of view, Galvani was in line with the general interest that contemporary naturalists devoted to the so-called weak electricity. Indeed, several “electricians” of the time, like Bennet, Henly, and Cavallo in England; Saussure in Switzerland; and Vassalli and Volta in Italy, were interested in studying the “lowest electric degrees,” as documented by the construction of progressively more and more accurate and sensitive electrometers. At the basis of such an interest,.

Observations that were often secondhand and of a dubious validity. To the list belonged “natural electrical commotions felt or produced by some persons, spontaneous combustions, sparking lights which come out from the eyes of people affected by hydrophobia or by some violent passion, [ . . . ] electric lights which shine spontaneously on the body of some persons during night without any previous friction” and, at long last, an experiment designed by Bertholon himself, according to which an.

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