Luigi Galvani showed how electricity could make muscles twitch. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, realizing that money could be made from this, devised a stage show in which he applied electricity to animate the bodies of recently executed murderers and the heads of guillotine victims, causing their eyes to open and their mouths to make noiseless shapes. The logical assumption was that if electricity could stir the dead, imagine how it might help the living. In small doses (at least we may hope they were small), it was used for all kinds of maladies, from treating constipation to stopping young men
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