ABSTRACT
A MONSTER IS AN imaginary creature that is usually large, frightening or ugly. Among all monsters, perhaps Frankenstein has become the most popular in cinema.
In 1780, Luigi Galvani was a professor at the Academy of Science at the University of Bologna where he taught anatomy by human dissection to the medical students, participated actively in debates and published a paper every year at the academy. Th at year, he became interested in animal electricity aft er fi nding that he could make the muscles of a frog leg contract and kick when stimulated with electric current in the sciatic nerve. Th is discovery implied that muscle contraction was the result of electricity carried in a liquid rather than air as it had been thought earlier in the scientifi c community. Animal electricity (later coined “galvanism” in homage to its discoverer) gave birth to electrophysiology, a science that still is a major fi eld of research, especially in neuroscience and psychiatry.
