The great Era of English Electrophysiology: from Francis Gotch to Hodgkin and Huxley

Abstract

Electrophysiology, the science born with the research of Luigi Galvani on “animal electricity” in frog preparations, found its ideal completion in the work of Hodgkin and Huxley on the mechanisms of impulse generation and propagation in the squid axon. The two brilliant English scientists concluded the studies of their great predecessors and teachers, and with their research carried out in the 1950s they laid down a solid foundation for modern electrophysiology. This paper aims at illustrating, briefly, the history of this fascinating scientific adventure that led to the discovery of some of the most elusive and subtle biological processes present in nature, which has come to the light only through the impressive experimental and logic endeavour of generations of great scientists across the nineteenth and twentieth century.