Luigi Galvani (9.09.1737-4.12.1798) was an Italian physicist and physiologist. He was born in Bologna. He graduated from the University of Bologna (1759), and from 1775 he was professor at that university.
In 1773 he began an anatomical study of the movements of the muscles of frogs, and in 1780 he carried out his first electrophysiological experiments on them. After 11 years of research and experiment, which led him to the discovery (1786) of brief pulses of electric current in the tissue of the frog, or, as he called it, of “animal” electricity, he published his results in 1791 in the “Commentary on the Forces of Electricity in Muscular Motion”. Galvani noticed that if the muscles and the nerves of a freshly killed and dissected frog are connected by a metal conductor, its muscles contract at once. The contractions become stronger and longer if the conductor consists of two dissimilar metals, for example iron and copper or silver. Galvani concluded that the contractions of the frog's muscles are caused by the appearance of an electric current in them. He saw the reason for this, however, in the presence in every animal of a so-called animal electricity of its own, and he developed a theory of it according to which the muscles and the nerves form something like the “plate” of a Leyden jar, while the metal conductor serves as a discharger that produces the discharge. Galvani's error was soon corrected by A. Volta, who proved that the electric currents in Galvani's experiments arose from the connection of metal conductors with animal tissue.
Galvani was one of the founders of the study of electricity, and his experiments with “animal” electricity opened a new line of scientific research, electrophysiology.