Eusebio Valli was a physician

Physician

A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

 from Lari, Pisa

Pisa

Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

, Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, who in the shadows of Luigi Galvani

Luigi Galvani

Luigi Aloisio Galvani was an Italian physician and physicist who lived and died in Bologna. In 1791, he discovered that the muscles of dead frogs legs twitched when struck by a spark...

 and Alessandro Volta

Alessandro Volta

Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Gerolamo Umberto Volta was a Lombard physicist known especially for the invention of the battery in 1800.-Early life and works:...

 also studied the phenomenon of animal electricity or bioelectricity.

Animal electricity

Galvani's 1792 publication regarding the application of various metals to frogs inspired a large number of other Italian scientists to research what Galvani had dubbed "animal electricity." Eusebio Valli was the first of this group to publish and wrote that the discovery had prevented him “to sleep during several nights”. In the following months Valli became an ambassador of animal electricity in Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, making public displays of the galvanian experiments and publishing galvanian papers in cities such as Turin

Turin

Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...

, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, and London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. In 1793 he published a 300-page volume in English, titled Experiments on Animal Electricity that at the time constituted the most organic analysis of all the problems of galvanism

Galvanism

In biology, galvanism is the contraction of a muscle that is stimulated by an electric current. In physics and chemistry, it is the induction of electrical current from a chemical reaction, typically between two chemicals with differing electronegativities....

.

When Volta renounced the distinction of "animal electricity", something that Galvani who believed in vitalism

Vitalism

Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is#a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions...

 could not do, Valli stayed true to Galvani and called Volta's electricity of metals "imaginary." Volta, of course, went on to invent the voltaic pile

Voltaic pile

A voltaic pile is a set of individual Galvanic cells placed in series. The voltaic pile, invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800, was the first electric battery...

, the progenitor of the battery

Battery (electricity)

An electrical battery is one or more electrochemical cells that convert stored chemical energy into electrical energy. Since the invention of the first battery in 1800 by Alessandro Volta and especially since the technically improved Daniell cell in 1836, batteries have become a common power...

.

Valli also conducted experiments dealing with vaccination

Vaccination

Vaccination is the administration of antigenic material to stimulate the immune system of an individual to develop adaptive immunity to a disease. Vaccines can prevent or ameliorate the effects of infection by many pathogens...

, a field in which he was less successful. In 1788, he unsuccessfully tried to vaccinate humans against 'human plague'

Black Death

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. Of several competing theories, the dominant explanation for the Black Death is the plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Thought to have...

 by inoculating rinderpest

Rinderpest

Rinderpest was an infectious viral disease of cattle, domestic buffalo, and some other species of even-toed ungulates, including buffaloes, large antelopes and deer, giraffes, wildebeests and warthogs. After a global eradication campaign, the last confirmed case of rinderpest was diagnosed in 2001...

 (cattle plague). In testing potential vaccines for the Rabies virus

Rabies virus

The rabies virus is neurotropic virus that causes fatal disease in human and animals. Rabies transmission can occur through the saliva of animals....

 on himself, he caused his own premature death.

Popular references

Valli is named in Xavier de Maistre

Xavier de Maistre

Xavier de Maistre of Savoy , lived largely as a military man, but is known as a French writer. The younger brother of noted philosopher and counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre, Xavier was born to an aristocratic family at Chambéry in October 1763...

's A Journey around my Room at the beginning of Chapter 42:

I was sitting by my fire, after dinner...when the vapours of digestion, rising to my brain, so obstructed the passages by which ideas make their way there from my sense that all communication found itself intercepted; and just as my senses were no longer transmitting any ideas to my brain, the latter, in its turn, could no longer send out the electrical fluid that animates them, the fluid with which the ingenious Dr. Valli resuscitates dead frogs.

Sources

The Controversy on Animal Electricity in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Galvani, Volta and Others by Walter Bernardi

Changing a Theory: The Case of Volta’s Contact Electricity, Nahum Kipnis