Galvanism
Encyclopedia
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
, galvanism is the contraction of a muscle
Muscle
Muscle is a contractile tissue of animals and is derived from the mesodermal layer of embryonic germ cells. Muscle cells contain contractile filaments that move past each other and change the size of the cell. They are classified as skeletal, cardiac, or smooth muscles. Their function is to...
that is stimulated by an electric current. In physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
and chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
, it is the induction of electrical current from a chemical reaction, typically between two chemicals with differing electronegativities
Electronegativity
Electronegativity, symbol χ , is a chemical property that describes the tendency of an atom or a functional group to attract electrons towards itself. An atom's electronegativity is affected by both its atomic number and the distance that its valence electrons reside from the charged nucleus...
.
History
The effect was named by Alessandro VoltaAlessandro 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:...
after his contemporary, the scientist 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...
, who investigated the effect of electricity on dissected animals in the 1780s and 1790s. It happened when Galvani was doing some dissection work in his lab with the frog, and one more dissected frog was hanging on the brass rod, suddenly Galvani's scalpel made up of steel touched the brass rod, and he saw twitching of muscle in frog's leg, he then did it again, and saw the twitching of muscle again. Hence, he thought that there is some energy passing present. But his idea was told to be unfaithful at that time. But then Alessandro Volta gave this theory again, and named after Galvani. Galvani himself referred to the phenomenon as animal electricity, believing that he had discovered a distinct form of electricity. Volta, on the other hand, claimed that the reputed animal electricity was due to an interaction between the metals used to mount and dissect the frog's leg, and in 1800, before the Royal Society in London, announced the Voltaic Cell or pile, essentially the battery.
Modern studies
The modern study of galvanic effects in biology is called electrophysiologyElectrophysiology
Electrophysiology is the study of the electrical properties of biological cells and tissues. It involves measurements of voltage change or electric current on a wide variety of scales from single ion channel proteins to whole organs like the heart...
, the term galvanism being used only in historical contexts. The term is also used to describe the bringing to life of organisms using electricity, as popularly associated with (but never explicitly depicted in) Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
's work Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
, and people still speak of being 'galvanized into action'.
Fictional references
Many Victorian scientists believed that if the right amount of electricity was charged into the brain, the corpse would come back to life for a short while.See also
- ElectrotherapyElectrotherapyElectrotherapy is the use of electrical energy as a medical treatment In medicine, the term electrotherapy can apply to a variety of treatments, including the use of electrical devices such as deep brain stimulators for neurological disease. The term has also been applied specifically to the use of...
- Electrotherapy (cosmetic)Electrotherapy (cosmetic)Cosmetic electrotherapy is a range of beauty treatments that uses low electric currents passed through the skin to produce several therapeutic effects, such as muscle toning in the body, and micro-lifting of the face...
- FrankensteinFrankensteinFrankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
- Hallerian physiologyHallerian physiologyHallerian physiology was a theory competing with galvanism in Italy in the late 18th century. It is named after Albrecht von Haller, a Swiss physician who is considered the father of neurology....
, for a counter-theory to Galvanism