..". and still we could never suppose that fortune were to be so friendly to us, such as to allow us to be perhaps the first in handling, as it were, the electricity concealed in nerves, in extracting it from nerves, and, in some way, in putting it under everyone's eyes."

With these words, Luigi Galvani announced to the world in 1791 his discovery that nervous conduction and muscle excitation are electrical phenomena. The result of more than years of intense experimental work, Galvani's milestone achievement concluded a thousand-year scientific search, in a field long dominated by the...

Between 1550 and 1750 all over Europe post-mortems were carried out on those who had died of a disease. In households, courts, hospitals and the legal arena, bodies were cut up and observed for a variety of purposes, and yet this practice and the knowledge it generated have virtually disappeared from a historiography that has instead focused either on the anatomical investigations of healthy bodies or on bedside practice. Dissections in the pre-Morgagni period still tend to be seen as failed attempts to create what could only take place with the emergence of pathological anatomy in the Paris...