Daily Almanac for
Oct 11, 2008
Search White Pages
Info search tips
Bio search tips

Encyclopedia

Galvani, Luigi

Galvani, Luigi (lOOē'jē gälvä'nē) [key], 173798, Italian physician. He was professor of anatomy from 1775 at the Univ. of Bologna and was noted as a surgeon and for research in comparative anatomy. During experiments on muscle and nerve preparations of frogs, he noticed the contraction of a frog's leg touched with charged metal. He devised an arc of two metals with which contractions could be induced and in 1791 published his results, attributing the source of electricity to the animal tissue. The explanation was disputed by Volta, who correctly believed that the electricity originated in the metallic arc. The controversy focused attention on electricity in animals and stimulated research in electrotherapy and on electric currents. Many terms in electricity are derived from Galvani's name.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

    • Cite
    • Print
    • Bookmark

More on Luigi Galvani from Infoplease:

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Medicine: Biographies


Warning: DOMDocument::loadXML(): Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xED 0x63 0x75 0x6C in Entity, line: 1 in /site/html/include/elibrary_search_box.php on line 284
Premium Partner Content
HighBeam Research
Documents Images and Maps Reference
(from Newspapers, Magazines, Journals, Newswires, Transcripts and Books)

Research our extensive archive of more than 28 million documents from 2,600 sources.

Additional search results provided by HighBeam Research, LLC. © Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.