The Root of Thought Read Online Free PDF Page A

and mouth. The decapitatedheads contracted into different facial expressions: smiling, grimacing, and coy expressions.
    Aldini also presaged electroshock therapy by applying the Voltaic pile to his head and shocking himself at arbitrary strengths. He reported it as unpleasant and causing insomnia for a week. It’s probably better to stick to electric fish to the head. The contractions were of interest for those treating the mentally insane because of evidence that camphor-induced seizures were therapeutic for the clinically depressed. Shocking the hell out of you will surely get you out of a funk.
    Scientists weren’t the only ones interested in animal electricity. The public and governments of researchers ardently consumed any new experiment. The public’s fascination with the subject peaked in the early nineteenth century with the publication of
Frankenstein
. Taking the frightening and grotesque scientific literature produced by Volta and Aldini, which induced hysteria similar to cloning and stem cells today, Mary Shelley, in Switzerland with her husband and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and friend, poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, brought back the dead while telling ghost stories late at night.
    With Volta still on his soapbox denouncing Galvani’s work, after
Frankenstein
, people were relieved that animal electricity might not be true. However, in Italy, Galvani’s homeland, animal electricity was still avidly pursued, with the next notable discoveries by the physicist Leopold Nobili (1784–1835) and his student Carlo Matteucci (1811–1868) in the 1830s. Using only saline after decapitating a frog, they placed the trunk in one jar and the legs in another and connected them with a cotton thread soaked in salt solution. Contractions occurred without Volta’s iron and brass metallic arc.
    Many of the cellular ideas of the brain at the time were solidified in the same lab by students who all graduated around the same time from the University of Berlin. These students included German scientist Johannes Müller (1801-1858), who advised several prominent experimenters; Robert Remack (1815-1865), who determined the nerve fiber hooked up with the cell body; Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), who developed the theory for the conservation of energy; Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902), who was one of the first to discover the glial cell; and finally, the one with the most forceful personality, Emile du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), who was the father of the action potential.
    Emile du Bois-Reymond came to Müller excitedly with a copy of Matteucci’s work and proclaimed his interest in pursuing animal electricity. Müller knew Matteucci had recently become frustrated with his experiments and completely denounced animal electricity—going so far as to claim that he shared Volta’s view that the nerves were filled with a non electric fluid or Newton’s ether, a belief also shared by Müller. But he decided to give his student the project to further study the earlier phenomena Nobili’s lab discovered. Du Bois-Reymond ran with the work and first developed more sensitive galvanometers to understand whether electrical potential existed.
    If Volta was persuasive in his condemnation of Galvani, du Bois-Reymond was just as influential in his trumpeting of Galvani’s virtues. He replicated many of Matteucci’s experiments. But, after stimulation, he measured electrical conductance moving along the nerve to the muscle. He then was able to determine the speed of the conductance after causing contractions in the frog nerve. He determined that from stimulation to contraction, the speed was 30–40 meters per second. This is similar to what is reported today. But a problem then was that it was much slower than the electrical conduction that occurred through a wire.
    Many other Descartes’ vitalists who believed that the functions of a living organism are due to the hydraulic pumping of fluids still searched for the essential element and sided