Hallerian physiology was a theory competing with

galvanism Galvanism is a term invented by the late 18th-century physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta to refer to the generation of electric current by chemical action. The term also came to refer to the discoveries of its namesake, Luigi Galvani, specif ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

in the late 18th century. It is named after

Albrecht von Haller Albrecht von Haller (also known as Albertus de Haller; 16 October 170812 December 1777) was a Swiss anatomist, physiologist, naturalist, encyclopedist, bibliographer and poet. A pupil of Herman Boerhaave, he is often referred to as "the fa ...

, a

Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri * Swiss, North Carolina *Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses *Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports *Swiss Internation ...

physician who is considered the father of

neurology Neurology (from el, wikt:νεῦρον, νεῦρον (neûron), "string, nerve" and the suffix wikt:-logia, -logia, "study of") is the branch of specialty (medicine), medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of co ...

. The Hallerians' fundamental tenet held that muscular movements were produced by a

mechanical force In physical sciences, mechanical energy is the sum of potential energy and kinetic energy. The principle of conservation of mechanical energy states that if an isolated system is subject only to conservative forces, then the mechanical energy is ...

, different from life and from the

nervous system In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes th ...

, and which operated beyond

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

. The activity of this function could be controlled in dead and dissected animals by touching a metal knife to the

muscle fiber A muscle cell is also known as a myocyte when referring to either a cardiac muscle cell (cardiomyocyte), or a smooth muscle cell as these are both small cells. A skeletal muscle cell is long and threadlike with many nuclei and is called a muscl ...

or by a spark being discharged on them. The

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described ...

operated only as a stimulus of

irritability Irritability (also called as crankiness) is the excitatory ability that living organisms have to respond to changes in their environment. The term is used for both the physiological reaction to stimuli and for the pathological, abnormal or excessi ...

, and it was irritability which was the one, true cause of the contractions.

Sources

The Controversy on Animal Electricity in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Galvani, Volta and Others
by Walter Bernardi Neurophysiology {{Sci-hist-stub