The Subject as Instrument: Galvanic Experiments, Organic Apparatus and Problems of Calibration.

Abstract

What was being studied in galvanic experiments, among its simple chains of frog legs and metals? Galvanic experiments promised a new technique for investigating the phenomena of muscular contraction, and the respective roles of nerves and muscle fibers and the action of stimuli in effecting contractions. Organic parts, frog legs capable of reacting to stimuli, were also used as sensi­ tive instruments for detecting weak forms of electricity. But galvanic experi­ ments seemed also to indicate new forms of electricity, an electricity generated in organic material or through metallic contact, that appeared to be related to and yet distinct from the artificial electricity generated by electrical machines and atmospheric electricity. Galvanic experiments were also productive of chemical changes in organic parts and metals, and thus suggestive of relations between chemistry, electricity and organic processes. Finally, they promised medical applications, as a new useful instrument for the treatments of cer­ tain ailments and for distinguishing merely apparent from actual death. But because galvanic experiments intersected with such a variety of phenomena and interests, it was not always clear in these experiments what was being studied. In galvanic experiments, what constituted the phenomena being investigated, what was the apparatus generative of the phenomena, and what was the instru­ ment reading the phenomena? This entanglement of phenomena, apparatus and instruments was at the centre of investigations of galvanic experiments in German settings. Reports of Luigi Galvani’s remarkable experiments in German periodicals from 1792 framed them in the terms of Galvani’s dispute with Alessandro Volta, and the question of whether Galvani’s experiments had disclosed a new form of elec­ tricity, animal electricity, or whether the frog legs used in the experiments were