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Physiologists in the opening decades of the 18th century were skeptical of existing theories about how the nerves work. Some scientists began to wonder whether the nervous system may work by electricity, a term coined by the British physicist William Gilbert around 1600. Because so many people were involved with electricity, and because knowledge about electricity led to developments in so many different scientific fields, some broad-minded historians say that there was no single figure dominating the study of electricity at this time. When discussions narrow to just the history of neurophysiology, however, Luigi Galvani stood out. Galvani's experiments and theories were not as revolutionary as they were evolutionary. Galvani studied electricity with animals because this was one of the most exciting things an aspiring scientist could do, and he was the recipient of a wealth of experimental findings and new ideas. This chapter looks at Galvani's experiments with animals such as frogs, his theory on animal electricity, and his conflict with Alessandro Volta. Works on electrotherapy and the electric fish are also considered.

Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who would be celebrated for the invention of the electric battery (“Voltaic pile”), was Galvani's most influential and visible antagonist in the debate over whether electricity might exist in more than a few strange fish. In fact, the invention of the electric battery was an unexpected but fortuitous consequence of Volta's research on the debated subject of animal electricity. This chapter begins with Volta's initial forays into animal electricity, which would lead him to work on metallic electricity and his repeated assaults on Galvani's experiments and theories. The chapter then shows how Volta's obsession with weak electricity arising from different metals motivated him to find ways of multiplying the metallic force, culminating in the invention of the electric battery, an acknowledged wonder of the scientific Enlightenment and an invention with important past and future associations with electric fish.

Alexander von Humboldt, a young German baron with training in the sciences, became an international celebrity in the opening decades of the 19th century as a result of his exciting and dangerous travels through the New World and his magnificent illustrated volumes about his scientific explorations. Of all his writings, the material that more than any other captured his readers' imaginations was his encounter with South American eels. Humboldt believed that the eels were releasing their shocks intentionally, a contention made by others before him. He reasoned that, if the discharges were intentional, they should cease upon severing the nerves from the brain to the electrical organs. A cut from his knife confirmed this prediction. He also found that shocks could be transmitted through most of the usual conductors of electricity, including metal rods and people holding hands, and not through the standard array of non-conductors. This set up his long-awaited experiments with substances that had revealed possible differences between animal, metallic, and true electricity.

This chapter analyzes the evidence that was gathered during the last fifty years of the 18th century about the electric charges of certain fishes. It first studies what people thought about these fishes prior to the “Age of Electrical Experiments,” including some older history and theories. It also considers generalized ideas about animal electricity, such as the thought that electricity could account for nerve and muscle physiology.

The publication of Galvani’s memoir in 1791started a lively debate all over Europe and in the last decade of the eighteenth century animal electricity became the most important scientific topic being debated by the medical and scientific community, along with the new chemistry proposed by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. A particular interest in Galvani’s experiments was taken by Alessandro Volta, physicist in Pavia and an expert in electrical studies. This chapter focuses on the early stage of the controversy between Galvani and Volta from new perspectives, which allow to get a better understanding of the scientific issues implied in the arguments of the two Italian scientists, and also to correct a few historiographical errors that have been made in the interpretation of both Galvani’s and Volta’s scientific work

This chapter reconstructs the final stage of Galvani’s electrophysiological investigation, which led him to the publication of his theory of animal electricity. The final model of the muscle as an “animal Leyden jar” emerged from a tortuous path, characterized by Galvani’s ability to exploit the results coming from different research programmes such as the study of the role of “airs” (the 18^th century term for gases) in the living bodies and the investigation of the effects of different forms of electricity on nerves and muscles. Between 1786 and 1791 Galvani elaborated several versions of his explanation of nerve conduction and muscular contraction, which varied with the progress of the experiments performed during this period as well as on reflections concerning electric fishes and tourmaline. The final version of his theory of animal electricity was formulated in 1791 and published in De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari, a major contribution in the history of science.

Using early microscopes, Leewenhoek and Fontana describe nerve fibres. Galvani discovers that electricity causes frog muscles to twitch, though the existence of “animal” electricity is doubted by Volta. Nobili is able to measure an injury current in muscle and Matteucci obtains dramatic, though indirect, evidence for some kind of impulse in muscle contraction. The impulse, or “negative variation,” is detected by du Bois Reymond with a sensitive galvanometer and its velocity in frog nerve is measured by Helmholtz using two methods. Hermann likens the structure and function of the nerve fibre to a series of electric components and his contemporary, Bernstein, invents an ingenious mechanical device for determining the brief time-course a the nerve impulse. Bernstein proposes that the difference in electrical potential across a resting nerve or muscle fibre membrane is due to unequal concentrations of potassium ions on the two sides, the membrane itself being semipermeable. Bernstein envisages the impulse arising because of a brief and unselective increase in membrane permeablility. Elsewhere Ranvier discovers interruptions in the sheaths of the myelinated nerve fibres.

This chapter centers on what Edward Bancroft, a New Englander who became close to Franklin and who was elected a member of the Royal Society with his help, wrote about the South American eels. During the 1760s, Bancroft had practiced medicine and surgery in Guiana, as had Ingram before him, where he too had the opportunity to study the eels feared by the natives. Franklin had no way of knowing at the time that Bancroft would serve as a double agent during the American War of Independence. But he was quick to appreciate the case made by Bancroft for animal electricity, and fully understood why scientists of the famed Royal Society should mobilize to pursue additional groundbreaking research in this field.

According a tradition started already at the end of the eighteenth century, the importance of Luigi Galvani's research was just because it stimulated the investigation path leading Alessandro Volta to the invention of the electric battery. According to this tradition there would be nothing in the nerves and muscle of living organisms like the 'animal electricity' invoked by Galvani to account for nervous conduction and muscle excitation. This tradition, revived even in nowadays publications, particularly of popular science (but non only), is largely based on a disregard of modern electrophysiology, the science that investigates the mechanisms by which the 'animal electricity' of Galvani is involved in some fundamental aspects of animal physiology. This book is aimed at re-evaluating the story of Galvani (and of Volta) on the basis of a careful study of published and unpublished sources and also with reference to the modern understanding of electrophysiology.

Colonel John Walsh more than anyone else would make electric fish electrical. He was elected into the Royal Society in 1770, being “a Gentleman well acquainted with philosophical & polite literature, & particularly versed in the natural history and antiquities of India”. After his election into the Royal Society, Walsh interacted with the organization's esteemed natural philosophers and electrical scientists. Of these people, Franklin was singularly important. Not only did Franklin introduce Walsh to other people of merit in the organization, he played the leading role in encouraging Walsh to devote his scientific energies to sea torpedoes, and specifically to test the hypothesis that their discharges are electrical.

German life science developed in the last decades of the eighteenth century via a research program pursuing “life forces” [Lebenskräfte]. It drew on Haller’s irritability and sensibility and on Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb. It was also energized by the reception of French (Lavoisierian) “antiphlogistic” chemistry and by Galvani’s “animal electricity.” The key figure in these developments was Kielmeyer. His great Address of 1793, Über die Verhältniße der organischen Kräfte unter einander, enunciated the fusion of this physiology of organic forces with ideas of paleontology and the geological development of earth into a comparative and developmental historicization of life forms to establish a unified science of life. Thus Kielmeyer produced the first “system program of biology.” He had enormous impact, launching what Schelling called “an entirely new epoch of natural history.” Others associated with the University of Göttingen in the 1790s – Girtanner, Pfaff, Link, Humboldt and Brandis – made important contributions to this endeavor. Their crucial critic and rival was Reil, who proposed an alternative grounding of life science in organic chemistry.

Hibberd considers two stage adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appearing in London in 1823: Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, which played at the English Opera House near the Strand, and Henry Milner’s Frankenstein; or the Man and the Monster!, for the Coburg, a theatre for a primarily working-class audience, which was situated on the South Bank of the Thames. Both of these plays were melodramas, which meant that their dialogue was spoken but they also featured prominent mime, and the latter was generally accompanied by segments of descriptive music. In both, the monster was played by a mime. Hibberd situates Shelley’s novel and its adaptations in the context not only of contemporaneous developments in electrical medicine, but also of public scientific debates on animal electricity and vitalism, debates most prominently played out in the second half of the 1810s between two prominent members of London’s Royal College of Surgeons: John Abernethy and William Lawrence. Theatrical popularizations of the Frankenstein story, Hibberd argues, contributed in significant ways to these debates, most notably by configuring or staging music as a vital force, an electrical phenomenon imbued with the capacity to at once soothe, civilize, and shock.

Schelling’s philosophy moved from a physiological organ for knowledge of the absolute—based on studies of animal electricity by Luigi Galvani, Alexander von Humboldt, and Johann Wilhelm Ritter—to a cognitive organ that precipitated into artworks. In his Naturphilosophie, Schelling argued for a triadic structure in which organs related not only generals and particulars, but also different orders of being. He adapted terms set in debates about force in living beings to defend a naturalist metaphysics based on organs. This natural organ found its methodological counterpart in intellectual intuition, which played the central role in Schelling’s early efforts, and its reflection in aesthetic intuition was the “organon” of philosophy in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). By combining material and cognitive senses of “organ” in artifacts of human effort, Schelling anticipated philosophies of technology, especially that of Karl Marx.