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München 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 2: The tools of physics between, research, teaching and public outreach

GP 2.4: Vortrag

Montag, 18. März 2019, 15:30–16:00, HS 9

"a token of such things": the galvanism after Galvani and the myth of Frankenstein — •Bertozzi Eugenio — University Museum Network, VIa Zamboni 33, University of Bologna

Electrostatic machines, Leiden jars, conducting arcs and Volta Piles have been central tools in the development of electric physics in the second half of the XVIII and the beginning of the XIX Century. Beside their role in the development of the discipline, scholars have pointed out their uses as demonstrational tools in the public performance of experiments and education. This presentation will explore how, toward the end of the XVIII Century, the use of these instruments alimented visions and dreams of the highest capacity in the context of the life sciences. The analogy set by the scientists Luigi Galvani between the Leiden jars and the muscles of the frogs as anatomical places for storing electricity in 1791 transformed these devices into laboratory tools for understanding and explaining the physiological apparatus of the living creatures. After Galvani*s death in 1798, the extension of his experiments on frogs to dead human bodies with the use of the new Volta pile as done by Giovanni Aldini in Bologna, Paris and London gave a token that life could be restored; this sensation is still explicitly recalled as an inspirational motive by the English writer Mary Shelley in the preface of the romance *Frankenstein*, published in 1818. The threshold between electrical physics and literary fiction and the enhancement of the cognitive potential of scientific instruments has been the focus of the project *Frankenstein Senior* carried out in 2018 at the *Museo di Palazzo Poggi* of the University of Bologna.

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