Monday 17 April 2023

ANDREW´S BRAIN (E. L. DOCTOROW) AND THE GALVANI EXPERIMENTS

 Andrew was given the lesson plan in biology. It was simple enough and he used the occasion of the frog dissection, and a reprise of Galvani, the leg of a dead frog touched with a metal probetwitching as if still alive, to gradually direct the class to some Elementary facts of brain science. And the more he wandered off the lesson plan, the more they loved it, girls and boys, the inseparable lovers among them. One of the students jumped up on the stage of the study hall and held his fist to his mouth, microphonelike: “Here it´s dorsal, there it´s ventral, this here´s rostral, you nothin´but mental…”


On late 18th century, Galvani applied an electric charge to a frog which he was stuffing and the frog´s leg convulsed. This was the beginning og galvanism, which with te time was alpplied to bigger animals in public demonstrations and even with deaths by hanging. The influence on the later Frankenstein is very obvious

Although lately Volta proved Galvani was wrong by inventing batteries, Galvani´s work was crucial to te development of the study of nervous system, brain and nerve impulse