Luigi Galvani, born in 1736, was an early physiologist, interested in the relationship between electricity and the human body. Galvani's most famous experiment involved electrical stimulation of a frog's nerves. He discovered that the electrical stimulation caused the muscle attached to the nerve to contract, even when both were removed from the frog's body.
The subsequent identification of electricity as the nerve stimulus was made not by Galvani, but by Alessandro Volta. This conclusion was later disproved by Herman von Helmholtz who measured the speed of nerve conduction at approximately 90 feet per second, much less than the speed expected if nerve conduction were indeed a simple electrical process.

The surname Galvani provides the word stem for galvanism and such items as the galvanic cell, galvanised iron, and the galvanometer.

Galvani died in 1798.

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