Twitching frog legs gave Luigi Galvani a place in the dictionary
In 1780 a Bologna anatomist watched the legs of a dead frog jerk when an electric spark struck them. Luigi Galvani spent more than a decade chasing what he called animal electricity. His rival Alessandro Volta disagreed, yet coined a word in his honour, and today we galvanise steel and people alike.
Galvani was born in Bologna, then ruled by the popes, on 9 September 1737, the son of a goldsmith. Deeply devout from his teens, he later joined the lay Third Order of Saint Francis. He studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Bologna, graduating in 1759, and at 25 published a paper on the anatomy of bones. That same year he married Lucia Galeazzi, a scientist and the daughter of one of his teachers.
His career stayed rooted in his home city. He taught anatomy at the Institute of Bologna, became curator of its anatomical museum in 1766, where he demonstrated dissections to surgeons, painters and sculptors, and from 1782 was professor of obstetrics. Contemporaries remembered a mild, charitable man who closed lectures by pointing students toward divine providence.
Medical electricity was a fashionable field, and Galvani's 1791 treatise on electrical forces in muscle movement stirred fierce debate across Europe. Volta, a physics professor at Pavia, repeated the experiments and at first agreed, then argued that the twitching came from the metal connecting nerve to muscle rather than a special fluid inside the animal. Volta's hunch about the chemistry proved sound. The two men argued courteously, and Galvani left the public defence of his theory to his nephew Giovanni Aldini.
His last year was grim. In April 1798 the French-backed Cisalpine Republic demanded loyalty oaths from professors; Galvani refused, lost his posts and fell into poverty. Aldini won his reinstatement, announced shortly before Galvani died at his brother's house on 4 December 1798. His research later turned up on Mary Shelley's reading before she wrote Frankenstein, and his name lives on in galvanometers, galvanic corrosion and asteroid 10184 Galvani.
Source: Luigi Galvani
