Luigi GalvaniItalian physician and physicist

born Sept. 9, 1737, Bologna, Papal States [Italy] died Dec. 4, 1798, Bologna, Cisalpine Republic

Galvani followed his father’s preference for medicine by attending the University of Bologna, graduating in 1759. On obtaining the doctor of medicine degree, with a thesis (1762) De ossibus on the formation and development of bones, he was appointed lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bologna and professor of obstetrics at the separate Institute of Arts and Sciences. In 1762, also, he married Lucia, the only daughter of Professor Galeazzi of the Bologna Academy of Science, of which Galvani became president in 1772. Beginning with his doctoral thesis, his early research was in comparative anatomy—such as the structure of renal tubules, nasal mucosa, and the middle ear—with a tendency toward physiology, a direction appropriate to the later work for which he is noted. Galvani’s developing interest was indicated by his lectures on the anatomy of the frog in 1773 and in electrophysiology in the late 1770s, when, following the acquisition of an electrostatic machine (a large device for making sparks) and a Leyden jar (a device used to store static electricity), he began to experiment with muscular stimulation by electrical means. His notebooks indicate that, from the early 1780s, animal electricity remained his major field of investigation. Numerous ingenious observations and experiments have been credited to him; in 1786, for example, he obtained muscular contraction in a frog by touching its nerves with a pair of scissors during an electrical storm. Again, a visitor to his laboratory caused the legs of a skinned frog to kick when a scalpel touched a lumbar nerve of the animal while an electrical machine was activated. Galvani assured himself by further experiments that the twitching was, in fact, related to the electrical action. He also elicited twitching without the aid of the electrostatic machine by pressing a copper hook into a frog’s spinal cord and hanging the hook on an iron railing. Although twitching could occur during a lightning storm or with the aid of an electrostatic machine, it also occurred with only a metallic contact between leg muscles and nerves leading to them. A metallic arc connecting the two tissues could therefore be a substitute for the electrostatic machine.