Developments in neurophysiology in the 19th century
Hess, C.W.
Schweizerische Rundschau für Medizin Praxis 83(16): 483-490
1994
ISSN/ISBN: 1013-2058 PMID: 8191189 Document Number: 433256
The rise of neurophysiology in the 19th century was kindled by Luigi Aloysius Galvani's revolutionary claim for animal electricity at the end of the preceding century. He was first challenged by Allessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta who showed that the muscle twitch in Galvani's experiment was the result of electric stimulation rather than of an enabled biological current. The controversy between Galvani and Volta became a predominant and stimulating issue among the scientists of the early century and found its ultimate elucidation only 40 years later by the pioneering work of Carlo Matteucci of Pisa and Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond of Berlin, who both deserve the reknown as founders of modern neurophysiology. As the first influential promoter and mastermind of the experimental physiology, François Magendie of Paris primarily investigated the nervous system and inaugurated the lesion experiments to clarify specific functions of neural structures. Johannes Müller founded the German school of physiology with its eminent neurophysiological offspring: Du Bois-Reymond, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, and Eduard Friedrich Wilhelm Pflüger. It was Helmholtz's merit to have for the first time precisely assessed the motor conduction velocity by measuring the time interval between two different stimulation sites of the sciatic nerve of the frog. In their brilliant work published in 1870 Gustav Theodor Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig demonstrated that appropriately located focal electrical stimulation of the exposed cortex of dogs induces movement of the contralateral limbs and unequivocally disproved the then prevailing dogma of holistic capacity of the hemispheres, which denied localised functions within the cortex.