Galvani luigi biography books pdf

To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. In spite of the historical importance of the research that, in the second half of the 18th century, led Luigi Galvani Galvani to lay down the foundation of modern electrophysiology, his scientific personality is largely misrepresented in science history and in popular imagery.

He is still considered as a pioneer that by chance incurred some surprising experimental observations and was incapable of pursuing his research in a coherent way.

Presented is a descriptilte account f Alessandro Volta's first notable success in , the invention of a unique method of generating electricity.

In contrast with these views, Galvani was a high-standard scientist who succeeded, with the strength of experimental science, in demonstrating, in animals, electricity in a condition of disequilibrium between the interior and the exterior of excitable fibres. This electricity, called 'animal electricity', was deemed responsible for nerve conduction.

By studying the scientific endeavours of Galvani, through his published and unpublished material, and by situating them in the historical context of the physiology of the Enlightenment, this paper attempts to trace the elusive and complex path that led Galvani to his extraordinary discovery. Preceded by a companion paper on Galvani's life, this article is written on the occasion of the bicentenary of the death of Luigi Galvani.

From his studies on the effects of electricity on frogs, the scientist of Bologna derived the hypothesis that animal tissues are endowed with an intrinsic electricity that is involved in fundamental physiological processes such as nerve conduction and muscle contraction. Galvani's work swept away from life sciences mysterious fluids and elusive entities like "animal spirits" and led to the foundation of a new science, electrophysiology.

Two centuries of research work have demonstrated how insightful was Galvani's conception of animal electricity.

Luigi Aloisio Galvani 9 September – 4 December ) was an Italian physician, physicist, biologist and philosopher, who discovered animal electricity.

Nevertheless, the scholar of Bologna is still largely misrepresented in the history of science, because the importance of his researches seems to be limited to the fact that they opened the paths to the studies of the physicist Alessandro Volta, which culminated in with the invention of the electric battery. Volta strongly opposed Galvani's theories on animal electricity.

The matter of the scientific controversy between Galvani and Volta is examined here in the light of two centuries of electrophysiological studies leading to the modern understanding of electrical excitability in nerve and muscle. By surveying the work of scientists such as Nobili, Matteucci, du Bois-Reymond, von Helmholtz, Bernstein, Hermann, Lucas, Adrian, Hodgkin, Huxley, and Katz, the real matter of the debate raised by Galvani's discoveries is here reconsidered.