The origins of Galvanism
| Although it is difficult to establish who first introduced the term Galvanism in the natural philosophical discourse, we find it increasingly adopted from the mid 1790s. It replaced terms such as “animal electricity” and “Galvanic experiments,” which were used by Galvani himself or in the early publications on his work. | |
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In his Letters to Gren, where he first publicly mentioned the term “Galvanism,” Alessandro Volta referred this term to the experiments on the contact between two different metals and a third conducting material (usually a part of the animal) and their variations.[1] In the 1797 edition of Gren’s Grundriss der Naturlehre we find the following definition of Galvanism, which clearly reflected Volta’s opinion: “Galvani from Bologna was the first to observe muscular motions elicited by the contact between two different metals; after him, the phenomena of this sort were termed and included under the name of Galvanism”.[2] Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew and follower, made a similar statement when he wrote that “the observation he [i.e. Galvani] made at the time of his discovery, that of the particular property metallic armatures have to increase notably the intensity of Galvanism, has led him to employ them in all his experiments; in this he was imitated by most of those who have repeated his experiments, or performed new ones.”[3] Despite their different, and even opposite, opinions on the interpretation of Galvani’s experiments, Volta and Aldini agreed that Galvani had introduced a new experimental technology to investigate animal economy. In the second half of the 1790s, Galvanism was increasingly identified as a new branch of knowledge. In the preface to the French edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s work on the nervous system, published in 1799 after the visit of the German naturalist to Paris, we read: “Galvanism … [is a] new branch of physiology. The understanding [of Galvanic phenomena], extended every day, has led to the refutation of these inaccurate and false terms [i.e. animal electricity and metallic irritation]; and at present all the physiologists, keen to avoid the mistake, employ the word Galvanism which does not absolutely refer to the cause of phenomena.[4]
Further readings: Animal electricity at the end of the 18th century: the many facets of a great scientific controversy
[1] Volta, Opere, 1 (ref. 2), 391 ff., esp. on 417-419. [2] Ibid., 533. [3] Giovanni Aldini, Essai théorique et experimental sur le galvanisme, 1 (Paris, 1804), 3. [4] Alexander von Humoldt, Expériences sur le galvanisme (Paris, 1799), xiii, x.
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