Galvanism is the generation of an electric current by chemical action, or more broadly the study of the effects of electricity on living tissue, named for the physicist Alessandro Volta's term for the muscle contractions that Luigi Galvani had observed when animal tissue was exposed to an electric current. In medicine, Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini applied galvanic electrical stimulation to patients in the early 19th century, including cases of mental illness he claimed to treat successfully, and he also conducted well known public demonstrations of electrical stimulation on the bodies of the recently deceased. This early galvanic medical practice is considered a forerunner of modern electroconvulsive therapy, still used today for severe or treatment-resistant depression, as well as of the broader field of clinical electrophysiology that includes electrocardiography, electromyography and electrocorticography.
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