GALVANI, FOUNDER OF ANIMAL ELECTRICITY
The world that I regard is myself; it is the Microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and Fortunes, do err in my Altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not only in respect of the Heaven above us, but of that heavenly and celestial part within us; that mass of Flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind; that surface that tells the Heavens it hath an end, cannot persuade me I have any: I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty; though the number of the Arc do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my mind; whilst I study to find how I am a Microcosm, or little World, I find myself something more than the great one. There is surely a piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.
--Sir Thos. Browne, M.D.
GALVANI, FOUNDER OF ANIMAL ELECTRICITY.
It is often thought and only too often stated that the impetus to the rise of our modern science which came during the last half of the eighteenth century was due to the spirit of the French Revolution, making itself felt long before the actual declaration of the rights of man, by the French Encyclopedists. It is the custom to conclude that the spirit of liberty which was abroad infected the minds of the rising generation to such an extent that they cast off the fetters of old traditional modes of thinking, refused to accept supposed truths on the strength of tradition or on authority as before, tested knowledge for themselves, and as a consequence made true progress in the sciences. Something doubtless there is in this, and yet a careful investigation of the lives of the men to whom especially the beginnings of the biological sciences are due, will show that not only were they men with the deepest respect for authority, the greatest reverence for old modes of thinking, but also they were typical representatives of the developing influence of methods of education which are sometimes unfortunately deemed to be narrowing in the extreme.
We have already studied the life of Morgagni, the great Father of Modern Pathology, to find that he least of all, in his generation, was affected by any of the liberalizing tendencies that are supposed to have led up to the freedom of the human mind and the consequent successful broadening of human science. We shall see that there were many others who did their work at the end of the eighteenth century of whom this same thing can be said, and no more [{116}] striking examples of this can be found than the lives of two great Italians, Volta and Galvani, to whom the modern world has paid the tribute of acknowledging them as founders in electricity by taking their names to express important basic distinctions in the science.
It was not in Italy alone, however, that this adhesion of great scientific minds to the old orthodox teachings of Christianity constituted a notable characteristic of the history of eighteenth century science. Everywhere the same thing was true. Cavendish, Sir Humphrey Davy and Faraday, the great English scientists, to whom so much of progress in electricity and in physics is due, were very similar in this respect to their Italian colleagues. Oersted the Dane belongs in the same category. In France such distinguished names as Lamarck, the great founder of modern biology and the first to broach the theory of evolution; Haüy, the father of crystallography; Laplace, and many others might be mentioned. The lives of the men who were contemporary workers in medicine as sketched in the present volume will show this same thing to be true also in their cases.
A glance at the life of Aloysius Galvani will illustrate how little the spirit of the revolution had to do with the rise of electricity and the first discussions of its relations to life. He was born at Bologna, September 9, 1737. A number of his immediate relatives had been distinguished as clergymen. The early years of Galvani's life were spent in association with religious, and as a youth he wished to become a member of a religious order whose special function it was to assist the dying at their last hour. His father, however, was opposed to his entrance into religion, and so Galvani devoted himself to medicine at the University of Bologna, and at length became a professor of anatomy in his Alma Mater. Professor Galeazzi, who was at the time [{117}] one of the most distinguished professors in anatomy in Italy, was very much attracted to young Galvani and became his friend and patron in his student days. Galvani became a member of Galeazzi's household, and finally having fallen in love with one of his daughters, won her father's consent to their early marriage. The happiness in life that he thus prepared for himself became one of the often quoted exemplars of domestic felicity in Bologna, where Galvani's life was passed.