[15] Mezzini, Volta, Valli, Klein, Pfaff, Berhends, have denied that the heart could be moved by the Galvanic fluid. Hist. du Galvanisme, part i. p. 145. Bichat could obtain no contractions either in the heart of man or that of the dog. See Récherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort.
[16] Towards the end of the First Part.
[17] See Histoire du Galvanisme, vol. ii. p. 81.
[18] Ibid. vol. ii. p. 84.
[19] Vol. ii. p. 83.
[20] Saggio di Sperienze sul Galvanismo di Giovani Aldini; Bolonia 1802, p. 14, esp. 28.
[21] If the celebrated Bichat failed in his experiments on the human heart, as well as Aldini, it was, perhaps, owing to the same causes. The temperature was cold, and the interval between the time of execution and that of the experiment too long. “I was authorized,” says Bichat, “in the winter of the year 7, to make various trials on the bodies of unfortunate persons who had been guillotined. I had them at my disposal from thirty to forty minutes after execution. It was always impossible for me to produce the least motion by arming either the spinal marrow and the heart, or the latter organ and the nerves which it receives from the ganglions by the sympathetic, or from the brain by the par vagum.”
No. III.
Account of an experiment made at Calais, on the transmission of Galvanism through an arm of the sea. By J. Aldini.