The Matter of Motion and Galvani's Frogs (review)

B. Innes Williams. The Matter of Motion and Galvani's Frogs. Foreword by A. Rupert Hall. Bletchingdon, U.K.: Rana, 2000. 298 pp. Ill. £25.00 (0-9538092-0-X).

A desire to preserve the meaning of vanishing worlds, together with pietas toward transience, may be considered the very core of the historian's job. In publishing Billie Innes Williams's manuscript papers on Galvani's neurophysiology twenty years after her death, her husband Peter Williams not only completes a labor of love, but in so doing he also revives the world she constructed in years of painstaking research.

This is a book on Luigi Galvani, but the famous frogs twitching with galvanic energy follow a detailed analysis of the conceptual and historical context underlying Galvani's discoveries. As A. Rupert Hall writes in his preface, to achieve a full understanding of Galvani's work, Williams "thought it necessary to discover the background history of ideas concerning the origins of motion in the world from the time of the Greek founders of our science onwards" (p. 1). At this point, probably, some historians will twitch with the same galvanic energy as Galvani's frogs, especially those scholars who look unfavorably on the history of ideas. Content to work in their horti conclusi, the so-called specialists--might we not call them bureaucrats?--turn their backs on the big picture and prefer to tell us brilliant little stories. Billie Williams, conversely, was engaged by the challenging task of finding a continuity of meaning in history.

In a very original way, Williams takes Aristotle's highly sophisticated analysis of self-motion as both a starting point at which and an interpretive scheme by which to outline a brief history of philosophical and scientific views concerning the material basis of motion. In this way, self-moving matter is seen variously as the material of fire, small round atoms, the invisible and pervasive quintessence, vital and animal spirits, or shaping and self-delimiting light. In the seventeenth century, as physiological investigations began to be focused on the neurophysiology of muscular movement (regardless of whether the models were mechanical or vitalistic), the question of the matter of motion progressively shifted toward the nature of contractile matter. The muscle fiber became the seat of the contractile ability, investigated mainly in terms of explosions derived from chemical reactions (Willis and Mayow) or mechanical vibrations of ether particles (Newton). A turning point in the eighteenth century was Haller's doctrine of irritability.

The long "prelude" on the matter of self-motion (it occupies almost half of the book) leads finally to Galvani's achievments, which are introduced by a detailed reconstruction of the intellectual and scientific context of Bologna. As Williams points out, "[i]n no country was the problem of the nature of irritability more avidly studied than in Italy" (p. 108). The Italian translation of Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity appeared in 1774 and made it possible for the savants who were working on muscular neurophysiology to use a synthesis of electricity and Newtonian physics: the nervous juice could be envisaged as a flow of mutually repulsive particles capable of initiating movement upon coming into contact with particles of a different matter. Although Haller had ruled out the hypothesis that irritability could be an electrical phenomenon, several lines of experimental research on magnetism, light, electricity, muscle neurophysiology, heat, and combustion converged to corroborate that hypothesis.

We know that on 9 April 1772 Galvani read a paper on "Haller's irritability"; starting in 1777 he began to carry out chemico-physical investigations on the nature of muscular contraction; and finally, in 1791 he published his widely influential De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari. Galvani's main concern was to define the nature of the relationship between the "nervous force" and the electrical fluid. In his opinion, the electricity artificially produced and applied to the frog-preparations enhanced the...