citation needed LOL

In 1783, according to popular version of the story, Galvani dissected a frog at a table where he had been conducting experiments with static electricity, Galvani’s assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve of the frog with a metal scalpel, which had picked up a charge.[citation needed] At that moment, they saw sparks in an electricity machine and the dead frog’s leg kick as if in life. The observation made Galvani the first investigator to appreciate the relationship between electricity and animation — or life. This finding provided the basis for the current understanding that electrical energy (carried by ions), and not air or fluid as in earlier balloonist theories, is the impetus behind muscle movement. He is poorly credited with the discovery of bioelectricity.

Galvani called the term animal electricity to describe whatever it was that activated the muscles of his specimens. Along with contemporaries, he regarded their activation as being generated by an electrical fluid that is carried to the muscles by the nerves. The phenomenon was dubbed “galvanism”, after Galvani, on the suggestion of his peer and sometime intellectual adversary Alessandro Volta