Name Eusebio Valli Role Physician | Died 1816, Havana, Cuba | |
Eusebio Valli (1755–1816) was a physician from Lari, Pisa, Italy, who in the shadows of Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta also studied the phenomenon of animal electricity or bioelectricity.
Animal electricity
Galvani's 1792 publication regarding the application of various metals to frogs inspired a large number of other Italian scientists to research what Galvani had dubbed "animal electricity." Eusebio Valli was the first of this group to publish and wrote that the discovery had prevented him “to sleep during several nights”. In the following months Valli became an ambassador of animal electricity in Europe, making public displays of the galvanian experiments and publishing galvanian papers in cities such as Turin, Paris, and London. In 1793 he published a 300-page volume in English, titled Experiments on Animal Electricity that at the time constituted the most organic analysis of all the problems of galvanism.
When Volta renounced the distinction of "animal electricity", something that Galvani who believed in vitalism could not do, Valli stayed true to Galvani and called Volta's electricity of metals "imaginary." Volta, of course, went on to invent the voltaic pile, the progenitor of the battery.
Valli also conducted experiments dealing with vaccination, a field in which he was less successful. In 1788, he unsuccessfully tried to vaccinate humans against 'human plague' by inoculating rinderpest (cattle plague). In testing potential vaccines for the Rabies virus on himself, he caused his own premature death.