[Romantic origins of electrophysiology]

Research on static electricity and its effects on the human body date back to the invention of the electrizing or Wimshurst machine and the Leyden jar of 1743 and 1746. Such experiments often served as social pastimes, but they yielded many publications on medical aspects of static electricity. Attempts to explain the 'life force' of the vitalists and the old concept of the active principle of the nervous system, the 'spiritus animales', as electrical phenomena were unsuccessful because of the skeptic comments of leading experimental scientists such as Albrecht von Haller. When Mesmer reinvented 'animal magnetism' in 1776 as a fashionable term for treatment by suggestion, he appropriated theoretical, technical and social methods from the established ways of the experiments on static electricity. Therefore, the scientific character of Luigi Galvani's investigations was already compromised by his term 'animal electricity' when he published his famous 'Commentarius' in 1781. Volta in Pavia turned against Galvani, proving that galvanic currents are produced by metals alone, and rejecting 'animal electricity'. Volta's doctrine prevailed over Galvani's school after Volta's breakthrough with his pile, or battery, until Galvani's ideas were rehabilitated by Nobili, who in 1828 measured the 'frog current' with his galvanometer. This led to a flurry of bizarre experiments on rows of half-dismembered animals and severed parts of human cadavers. Johannes Müller in Berlin, who, with his students, established new principles of biology and neurology, asked Du Bois-Reymond to study these experiments. Du Bois-Reymond found that measurements of muscle currents in intact animals were more useful, and he compared them with his own observations on electric fishes.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)