Luigi Galvani

Luigi Galvani (1737 to 1798) was an Italian physician, physicist, biologist and philosopher from Bologna who studied what he called animal electricity. He graduated in medicine and philosophy from the University of Bologna in 1759, practised medicine at nearby hospitals, and taught anatomy at the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna for most of his career, serving as curator of its anatomical museum from 1766 and as Professor of Obstetric Arts from 1782 for sixteen years. In 1780, using a frog, he discovered that the muscles of dead frogs' legs twitched when struck by an electrical spark, an early study of bioelectricity. His 1791 work De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius summarised more than ten years of research and sparked heated controversy in Europe, most famously with Alessandro Volta, who came to doubt that the contractions came from electricity intrinsic to the animal and believed they depended on the metal conductors Galvani used. This entry records historical scientific work and is not medical advice.