It is often thought and only too often stated that the impetus to the
rise of our modern science which came during the last half of the
eighteenth century was due to the spirit of the French Revolution,
making itself felt long before the actual declaration of the rights of
man, by the French Encyclopedists. It is the custom to conclude that
the spirit of liberty which was abroad infected the minds of the
rising generation to such an extent that they cast off the fetters of
old traditional modes of thinking, refused to accept supposed truths
on the strength of tradition or on authority as before, tested
knowledge for themselves, and as a consequence made true progress in
the sciences. Something doubtless there is in this, and yet a careful
investigation of the lives of the men to whom especially the
beginnings of the biological sciences are due, will show that not only
were they men with the deepest respect for authority, the greatest
reverence for old modes of thinking, but also they were typical
representatives of the developing influence of methods of education
which are sometimes unfortunately deemed to be narrowing in the
extreme.
We have already studied the life of Morgagni, the great Father of
Modern Pathology, to find that he least of all, in his generation, was
affected by any of the liberalizing tendencies that are supposed to
have led up to the freedom of the human mind and the consequent
successful broadening of human science. We shall see that there were
many others who did their work at the end of the eighteenth century of
whom this same thing can be said, and no more {116} striking examples
of this can be found than the lives of two great Italians, Volta and
Galvani, to whom the modern world has paid the tribute of
acknowledging them as founders in electricity by taking their names to
express important basic distinctions in the science.
It was not in Italy alone, however, that this adhesion of great
scientific minds to the old orthodox teachings of Christianity
constituted a notable characteristic of the history of eighteenth
century science. Everywhere the same thing was true. Cavendish, Sir
Humphrey Davy and Faraday, the great English scientists, to whom so
much of progress in electricity and in physics is due, were very
similar in this respect to their Italian colleagues. Oersted the Dane
belongs in the same category. In France such distinguished names as
Lamarck, the great founder of modern biology and the first to broach
the theory of evolution; Hauey, the father of crystallography; Laplace,
and many others might be mentioned. The lives of the men who were
contemporary workers in medicine as sketched in the present volume
will show this same thing to be true also in their cases.
A glance at the life of Aloysius Galvani will illustrate how little
the spirit of the revolution had to do with the rise of electricity
and the first discussions of its relations to life. He was born at
Bologna, September 9, 1737. A number of his immediate relatives had
been distinguished as clergymen. The early years of Galvani's life
were spent in association with religious, and as a youth he wished to
become a member of a religious order whose special function it was to
assist the dying at their last hour. His father, however, was opposed
to his entrance into religion, and so Galvani devoted himself to
medicine at the University of Bologna, and at length became a
professor of anatomy in his Alma Mater. Professor Galeazzi, who was at
the time {117} one of the most distinguished professors in anatomy in
Italy, was very much attracted to young Galvani and became his friend
and patron in his student days. Galvani became a member of Galeazzi's
household, and finally having fallen in love with one of his
daughters, won her father's consent to their early marriage. The
happiness in life that he thus prepared for himself became one of the
often quoted exemplars of domestic felicity in Bologna, where
Galvani's life was passed.
Medici, in his panegyric of Galvani, which we shall have occasion to
quote from more than once, gives a very pretty story of the doctor's
wooing and marriage with Lucia Galeazzi, which we prefer to repeat in
the naive simplicity with which it is related by the Italian
panegyrist.
Galvani had been seriously thinking of matrimony for some time and
had, it seems (strange as that might be considered in a rising young
scientist in our day), even prayed for counsel in the matter. One of
his favorite saints was St. Francis of Sales, the Archbishop of
Geneva, the gentleman saint as he has been called, for whose charming
personal character Galvani had a very devout admiration. One day while
praying in one of the churches of Bologna before a statue of St.
Francis of Sales he looked up after some moments of abstraction to
find a young woman's face between him and the altar. The face proved
to be that of Lucia. Galvani looked upon it as a sign from heaven of
approval of some of his wishes, and applied for the hand of the fair
Lucia. Anyone who has seen the offerings at the shrine of St. Anthony
of Padua, not so far from Bologna, and has realized that the good
patron of things lost seems also to be a special subject of recourse
in cases of lost hearts among the northern Italians even at the
present day, will realize that probably the story as told is the
simple truth without any tincture of romance.
{118}
Galvani began original work of a high order very early in his medical
career. His graduation thesis with regard to bones, treating specially
their formation and development, attracted no little attention and is
especially noteworthy because of the breadth of view in it, for it
touches on the various questions relative to bones from the standpoint
of physics and chemistry as well as medicine and surgery. It was
sufficient to obtain for its author the place of lecturer in anatomy
in the University of Bologna, besides the post of director of the
teaching of anatomy in the Institute of Sciences, a subsidiary
institution. From the very beginning his course was popular. Galvani
was an easy, interesting talker, and he was one of the first who
introduced experimental demonstrations into his lectures.
At this time the science of comparative anatomy was just beginning to
attract widespread attention. John Hunter in London was doing a great
work in this line which has placed him in the front rank of
contributors to biology and collectors of important facts in all the
sciences allied to anatomy and physiology. Galvani took up this work
with enthusiasm and began the study particularly of birds. These
animals, the farthest removed from man of the beings that have warm
blood, present by that very fact many interesting contrasts and
analogies, which furnish important suggestions for the explanation of
difficult problems in human anatomy and physiology.
His experimental work in comparative anatomy, strange as it might
appear and apparently not to be expected, led him into the domain of
electricity through the observation of certain phenomena of animal
electricity and the effect of electrical current on animals.
Like so many other great discoveries in science, his first and most
important observations in electrical phenomena {119} were results of
an accident. Of course, it is easy to talk of accidents in these
cases. The fall of the apple for Newton, Laennec's observation of the
little boys tapping on a log in the courtyard of the Louvre, from
which he got his idea for the invention of the stethoscope, were
apparently merest accidents. Without the inventive scientific genius
ready to take advantage of them, however, these accidents would not
have been raised to the higher planes of important incidents in
history. They would have meant nothing. The phenomena had probably
occurred under men's eyes hundreds of times before, but there was no
great mind ready to receive the seeds of thought it suggested and go
on to follow out the conclusions so obviously indicated. Galvani's
observation of the twitching of the muscles of the frog under the
influence of electricity may be called one of the happy accidents of
scientific development, but it was Galvani's own genius that made the
accident happy.
There are two stories told as to the method of the first observation
in this matter. Both of them make his wife an important factor in the
discovery. According to the more popular form of the history, Galvani
was engaged in preparing some frog's legs as a special dainty for his
wife, who was ill and who liked this delicacy very much. He thought so
much of her that he was doing this himself in the hope that she would
be thus more readily tempted to eat them. While so engaged he exposed
the large nerve of the animals' hind legs and at the same time split
the skin covering the muscles. In doing this he touched the
nerve-muscle preparation, as this has come to be called, with the
scalpel and little forceps simultaneously, with the result that
twitchings occurred. While seeking for the cause of these twitchings
the idea of animal electricity came to him.
The other form of the story of his original discovery is not {120}
less interesting and is perhaps a little more authentic. One evening
he was engaged in his laboratory in making some experiments while some
friends and his wife were present. By chance some frogs, the hind legs
of which had been stripped of skin, were placed upon the table not far
from an apparatus for the generation of frictional electricity. They
were not in contact with this apparatus at any point, however, though
they were not far distant from the conductor. While the apparatus was
being used to produce a series of sparks, a laboratory assistant,
without thinking of any possible results, touched with the point of a
scalpel the sciatic nerves of one of the animals. Just as soon as he
did this all the muscles of this limb went into convulsive movement.
It was Galvani's wife who noticed what had happened and who had the
assistant use the scalpel once more with the same result.
She was herself a woman of well-developed intellect, and her
association with her father and husband made her well acquainted with
the anatomy and physiology of the day. She realized that what had
occurred was quite out of the ordinary. Accordingly, she called the
attention of her husband to the phenomena, and is even said to have
suggested their possible connection with the presence and action of
the electric apparatus. Husband and wife then together, by means of a
series of observations, determined that whenever the apparatus was not
in use the phenomenon of the conclusive movements of the frog's legs
did not take place, notwithstanding irritation by the scalpel.
Whenever the electric apparatus was working, however, then the
phenomenon in question always took place. According to either form of
the story it is clear that Madame Galvani had an important part in the
discovery, and Galvani himself, far from making little of what she had
accomplished, was always {121} glad to attribute his discovery, or at
least the suggestive hint that led up to it, to his wife.
After these first discoveries on the influence of artificial
electricity, nothing seemed more interesting than to investigate
whether ordinary atmospheric electricity as manifested in lightning
would produce the same effects on muscular movements. In this matter
Galvani showed much courage as an inventive genius. He dared to place
an atmospheric conductor on the highest point of his house and to this
conductor he attached a wire, which ran down to his laboratory. During
a storm he suspended on this metallic circuit by means of their
sciatic nerves frogs' legs and the legs of other animals prepared for
the purpose. To the feet of the animals he attached another wire
sufficiently long to reach down to the bottom of a well, thus
completing a current to the ground.
All the phenomena took place exactly as if with artificial
electricity. Whenever lightning flashed from the clouds the limbs of
the animals experimented with underwent violent contractions, which
were noticeable before the noise of the thunder, and were, so to say,
the signal for it. These contractions took place, although there were
no conductors from the muscles, and although the nerve conductors were
not isolated. The muscular contractions were greater in proportion
than the intensity of the lightning and the proximity of the storm.
The phenomena were manifest whether the animal was in the open air or
if, for greater convenience, it was enclosed in a room, or even in a
vessel. The muscular contractions could even be noticed despite the
fact that the nerves were separated somewhat from their conductor,
especially whenever the lightning was violent. The sparks would leap
over a small gap almost as in the case of artificial electricity, the
muscular contraction of the animal {122} being proportioned to the
energy and the nearness of the sparks.
It is almost needless to say, these experiments upon the frog were not
accomplished in a few days or a few weeks. Galvani had his duties as
Professor of Anatomy to attend to, besides the obligations imposed
upon him as a busy practitioner of medicine and surgery. At that time
it was not nearly so much the custom as it is at present, to use frogs
for experiments, with the idea that conclusions might be obtained of
value for the biological sciences generally, and especially for
medicine. There has always been an undercurrent of feeling that such
experiments are more or less a beating of the air. Galvani found
opposition not only to his views with regard to animal electricity as
enunciated after experimental demonstration, but also met with no
little ridicule because of the supposed waste of time at occupations
that could not be expected to lead to any practical results. It was
the custom among scientific men to laugh somewhat scornfully at his
patient persistence in studying out every detail of electrical action
on the frog, and one of the supposedly prominent scientists of the
time even dubbed him the frog dancing master. This did not, however,
deter Galvani from his work, though some of the bitter things must
have proved cutting enough, and might have discouraged a smaller man,
less confident of the scientific value of the work that he was doing.
There were even phases of physical science quite apart from physiology
or animal electricity, which he was able to illustrate by his
experiments. He called special attention, for instance, to the fact
that the lightning does not excite a single contraction of the muscle
as is the case with a spark of artificial electricity, but that there
are a series of muscular contractions succeeding one another rapidly
in diminishing {123} energy and somewhat corresponding to the
reiterated reports of thunder. This was Galvani's expression for the
dying away of the electrical influence upon the muscle. He had thus
evidently reached a hint of the pendulum-like swing with which
electrical equilibrium is restored after its violent disturbance
immediately following the lightning stroke. He noted, moreover, that
for the production of muscular contractions the absolute appearance of
lightning was not indispensable. Muscular twitchings were noted
whenever the heavens were overclouded by a storm, or whenever clouds
charged with electricity were passed above the conductor.
These experiments were made upon living frogs, as well as upon the
separated legs, and in both cases the results obtained were very
similar to those observed on the employment of some form of artificial
electricity. In some of these observations, Galvani was anticipating
ideas that became current truth in electrical science only many years
after his time. In his observations upon the effects of lightning, he
was forestalling Franklin's works to a certain extent. Both of these
great scientists, however, had been anticipated by a clergyman in
Austria; whose work attracted very little attention, however, because
he was not in touch with the scientific bodies of the day. The
demonstration of the identity of ordinary terrestrial artificial
electricity and the lightning was in the air, as it were, and many
workers, as is usually the case with any great discovery, came very
close to it, and deserve at least a portion of the credit for it.
It is almost needless to say, many of these experiments with lightning
thus conducted by Galvani were not without an element of serious
personal danger. Not long after this time a Russian savant, Richman by
name, while repeating Franklin's experiments with the kite, was struck
dead by the charge received from his apparatus. Galvani, however,
{124} devoted himself only in passing to the physical problems
involved, and kept always in view the physiological aspects of the
problem of animal electricity; and, accordingly, made a series of most
interesting observations on the ray fish or torpedo, as it is
sometimes called, the fish which gives electrical shocks. His idea was
to demonstrate that the shocks felt when this animal is touched are
really due to sparks of electricity similar to those which can be
obtained by artificial means. This had never been determined, and
Galvani succeeded in showing the presence of sparks exactly as if the
animal were one of the apparatuses by which the sparks of frictional
electricity are developed. At this time this seemed surprising enough.
Galvani also endeavored to demonstrate that the electricity in the
electric torpedo differed only in degree, but not in quality, from
certain electric manifestations that he had noted in the bodies of
other animals, especially the frog. His idea always was to show the
existence of a natural animal electricity, by means of which some of
the complex mechanism of life was accomplished. He seems to have had
some notion of the theory that has been suggested often enough since,
and is not yet entirely disproved, that there is some very close
relationship between nerve impulses and the electric current. In this,
of course, he was far ahead of his time, and utterly unable to make
absolute demonstration, because of the lack of proper apparatus.
The most interesting quality of Galvani's scientific career is the
thoroughly experimental character of all his researches into natural
phenomena. Few men have known so well how to vary their experiments so
as to bring out new details of scientific knowledge. His experimental
skill was of the highest order, and it is to this that we owe the
development in his hands of the nascent science of electricity to a
point {125} where it became easy to continue its natural evolution.
Galvani's work furnished the necessary stimulus to Volta, and then the
real foundation of modern electricity was laid.
Almost more interesting than Galvani the scientist, however, is
Galvani the man. As one of his biographers said of him, he joined to
the most eminent intellectual genius a group of very precious
qualities of the heart. Utterly unselfish in his relationship to
others, he was known to be extremely sympathetic and had a large
number of friends. His friends, too, he bound to him by even more than
the proverbial hoops of steel, so that when they passed out of life
they left him unconsolable. While it was very hard to get him to take
part in social functions at which numbers of people were gathered, he
was by no means a recluse, and liked to be in the company of a few
friends. He seemed to care very little for the renown that his
discoveries gave him, and refused, as far as possible, to be made the
object of public congratulations and testimonials.
His relations with his patients--for during all of his long career he
continued to practise, especially surgery and obstetrics--were of the
friendliest character. While his distinction as a professor at the
university gave him many opportunities for practice among the rich, he
was always ready and willing to help the poor, and, indeed, seemed to
feel more at home among poor patients than in the society of the
wealthy and noble. Even towards the end of his life, when the loss of
many friends, and especially his wife, made him retire within himself
much more than before, he continued to exercise his professional skill
for the benefit of the poor, though he often refused to take cases
that might have proved sources of considerable gain to him. Early in
life, when he was very busy between his professional work and his
practice, he remarked more than once, on refusing {126} to take the
cases of wealthy patients, that they had the money with which to
obtain other physicians, while the poor did not, and he would prefer
to keep some time for his services for them.
Toward the end of his life Galvani was not a little perturbed by the
course of events around him and by the sweeping away of faith in old
beliefs, consequent upon the French Revolution and the philosophic
movement that had led up to it. Seeing around him, too, the abuses to
which this supposed liberty and assertion of the rights of man led, it
used to be a favorite expression of Galvani that "A little philosophy
led men away from God, but a good deal of it led them back to Him
again." Especially did he consider this true with regard to younger
men, whose lack of wisdom in the difficult phases of life made them
think their philosophy of things was complete, until sad experience
had taught them the necessity for lifting men's minds above any mere
religion of humanity, any mere stoic resignation to the inevitable, if
what was best in them was to be brought out.
A very interesting phase of the Italian university life of that time
is revealed in two important incidents of Galvani's university career.
One of his professors, one, by the way, for whom he seems to have had
a great deal of respect, and to whose lectures he devoted much
attention, was Laura Caterina Maria Bassi, the distinguished woman
professor of philosophy at the University of Bologna, about the middle
of the eighteenth century. It is doubtless to her teaching that
Galvani owes some of his thoroughgoing conservatism in philosophic
speculation, a conservatism that was of great service to him later on
in life, in the midst of the ultra-radical principles which became
fashionable just before and during the French Revolution. Madame Bassi
seems to have had her influence on him for good not only during his
student {127} career, but also later in life, for she was the wife of
a prominent physician in Bologna, and Galvani was often in social
contact with her during his years of connection with the university.
As might, perhaps, be expected, seeing that his own happy domestic
life showed him that an educated woman might be the centre of
intellectual influence, Galvani seems to have had no spirit of
opposition to even the highest education for women. This is very well
illustrated by the first formal lecture in his course on anatomy at
the university, which had for its subject the models for the teaching
of anatomy that had been made by Madame Manzolini. In the early part
of the eighteenth century Madame Manzolini had been the professor of
anatomy at the University of Bologna, and in order to make the
teaching of this difficult subject easier and more definite she
modelled with great care and delicate attention to every detail, so
that they imitated actual dissections of the human body very closely,
a set of wax figures which replaced the human body for demonstration
purposes at least at the beginning of the anatomical course.
Galvani, in taking up the work of lecturer on anatomy, appreciated how
much such a set of models would help in making the introduction to
anatomical study easy, yet at the same time without detracting from
its exactness, and, accordingly, introduced his students to Madame
Manzolini's set of models in his very first lecture. At the time there
were those connected with the teaching of anatomy who considered the
use of these models as rather an effeminate proceeding. Galvani's lack
of prejudice in the matter shows the readiness of the man to accept
the best wherever he found it without regard to persons or feelings.
He was one of the most popular professors that the University of
Bologna has ever had. He was not in the ordinary {128} sense of the
word an orator, but he was a born teacher. The source of the
enthusiasm which he aroused in his hearers was undoubtedly his own
love for teaching and the power it gave him to express even intricate
problems in simple, straightforward language. More than any of his
predecessors he understood that experiments and demonstrations must be
the real groundwork of the teaching of science. Accordingly, very few
of his lectures were given without the aid of these material helps to
attract attention. Besides he was known to be one who delighted to
answer questions and was perfectly frank about the limitations of his
knowledge whenever there was no real answer to be given to a question
that had been proposed. Though an original discoverer of the first
rank, he was extremely modest, particularly when talking about the
details of his discoveries, or subjects relating to them.
The most striking proof of the thorough conscientiousness with which
he faced the duties of life is to be found in his conduct after the
establishment of the so-called Cis-Alpine Republic in Italy. This was
a government established merely by force of arms without the consent
of the people and a plain usurpation of the rights of the previous
government. He considered himself bound in duty to the authority under
which he had lived all his previous life and to which he had sworn
fealty. When the University of Bologna was reorganized under the new
government the first requirement of all those who were made professors
was that they should take the oath of allegiance to the new
government. This he refused to do. His motives can be readily
understood, and though practically all the other professors of the
university had taken the oath he did not consider that this freed him
from his conscientious obligations in the matter.
Accordingly, he was dropped from the roll of professors {129} and
deprived of the never very large salary which he had obtained from
this chair. On this sum he had practically depended for his existence
and he soon began to suffer from want. While he had been a successful
practitioner of medicine, especially of surgery, he had always been
very liberal and had spent large sums of money in demonstrations for
his lectures and personal experimentation and in materials for the
museums of the university. He began to suffer from actual want and
friends had to come to his assistance. He refused, however, to give up
his scruples in the matter and accept the professorship which was
still open for him. Finally, at the end of two years, influence was
brought to bear on the new government and Galvani was allowed to
accept his chair in the university without taking the oath of
allegiance. This tribute came too late, however, and within a short
time after his restoration to his professorship he died.
That his action in this matter was very properly appreciated by his
contemporaries, and that the moral influence of his example was not
lost, can be realized from the expressions used by Alibert, the
Secretary-general of the Medical Society of Emulation, in the
historical address on Galvani which he delivered before that society
in 1801:
"Galvani constantly refused to take the civil oath demanded by the
decrees of the Cis-Alpine Republic. Who can blame him for having
followed the voice of his conscience, that sacred, interior voice,
which alone prescribes the duties of man and which has preceded all
human laws? Who could not praise him for having sacrificed with such
exemplary resignation all the emoluments of his professorship rather
than violate the solemn engagements made under religious sanction?"
In the same panegyric there is a very curiously interesting passage
with regard to Galvani's habit of frequently closing his {130}
lectures by calling attention to the complexity yet the purposefulness
of natural things and the inevitable conclusion that they must have
been created with a definite purpose by a Supreme Being possessed of
intelligence. At the time that Alibert wrote his memoir it was the
fashion to consider, at least in France, that Christianity was a thing
of the past, and that while theism might remain, that would be all
that could be expected to survive the crumbling effect of the
emancipation of man.
He says: "We have seen already what was Galvani's zeal and his love
for the religion which he professed. We may add that in his public
demonstration he never finished his lectures without exhorting his
pupils to a renewal of their faith by leading them always back to the
idea of the eternal Providence which develops, preserves and causes
life to flow among so many different kinds of things. I write now," he
continues, "in the age of reason, of tolerance and of light. Must I
then defend Galvani in the eyes of posterity for one of the most
beautiful sentiments that can spring from the nature of man? No, and
they are but little initiated in the saner mechanism of philosophy who
refused to recognize the truths established on evidence so strong and
so authentic. _Breves haustus in philosophia ad atheismum ducunt,
longiores autem reducunt ad deum_, small draughts of philosophy lead
to atheism, but longer draughts bring one back to God"--(which may
perhaps be better translated by Pope's well-known lines, "A little
learning (in philosophy) is a dangerous thing; drink deep or touch not
the Pierian spring").
Galvani has been honored by his fellow-citizens of Bologna as one of
their greatest townsmen and by the university as one of her worthiest
sons. In 1804 a medal was struck in his honor, on the reverse of
which, surrounding a figure of the {131} genius of science, were the
two legends: _"Mors mihi vita"_ "Death is life or me," and _"Spiritus
intus alit,"_ "The spirit works within," which were favorite
expressions of the great scientist while living and are lively symbols
of the spirit which animated him. In 1814 a monument was erected to
him in the courtyard of the University of Bologna. It is surmounted by
his bust, made by the most distinguished Bolognian sculptor of the
time, De Maria. On the pedestal there are two figures in bas-relief
executed by the same sculptor, which represent religion and
philosophy, the inspiring geniuses of Galvani's life.
Before he died, he asked, as had Dante, whose work was his favorite
reading, to be buried in the humble habit of a member of the Third
Order of St. Francis. He is said to have valued his fellowship with
the sons of the "poor little man of Assisi" more than the many
honorary fellowships of various kinds which had been conferred upon
him by the scientific societies all over Europe.
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