Hey Podcast listener Martha here with a special away with words mini-cast.

Today I want to tell you a story and make a request.

The story is about a guy named Luigi.

He was born in 1737 in Bologna, Italy. He studied

medicine and philosophy at the university there and he went on to work as a physician and

a surgeon.

When he wasn't practicing medicine,

he was researching bird anatomy,

the structure of their kidneys, their auditory canals,

that sort of thing.

Eventually, he became a professor there and he and his

colleagues spent a lot of time puzzling over the nervous system.

Specifically what was the connection between nerves and the muscles they seemed to help move?

For centuries people had guesses about how they worked.

The ancient Greeks thought that nerves were hollow but filled with spirits some kind of mysterious invisible substances that cause sensation and motion.

The problem was nobody could verify any of this by experiment.

So other ideas were proposed. Maybe nerves somehow

dripped fluid onto muscles to stimulate them, for example. Then in the early

1700s some scientists began to suspect that maybe what filled and

operated the nerves was electricity. At the time there was a growing fascination

with this strange phenomenon called electricity.

Ben Franklin with the key in the kite, you see it right?

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