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Person

Luigi Galvani

A portrait of Luigi Galvani, an 18th-century anatomist with white hair, wearing a black coat and a white cravat, set against a dark background.

Bolognese anatomist (1737–1798) whose accidental observation of a dissected frog's leg twitching on a copper hook in the 1780s opened the field of electrophysiology. He published his findings in 1791 and spent his remaining years defending the idea of intrinsic 'animal electricity' against Volta's external explanation. He was right about the phenomenon, wrong about the mechanism, and the verb 'to galvanise' is named for him.

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