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Monday, November 5, 2012

How it all came to Organ Transplantation?

I was watching some episode in Discovery Science which was about how electricity is in relation with our body.Well I was not watching it from the beginning so I don't know what exact discussion was going on and how everything exactly came up.
When I started watching it was telling that electricity has some kind of relation with our mind and specially with our spinal cord.
Our brain is responsible for every move we make, other than reflexes which are made by signals sent to our spinal cord via nerves.You are declared "dead" when your heart stops pumping blood.

"In 1780 the Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani discovered that a spark of electricity could cause the limbs of a dead frog to twitch. Soon men of science throughout Europe were repeating his experiment, but it didn't take them long to bore of frogs and turn their attention to more interesting animals. What would happen, they wondered, if you electrified a human corpse?

Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, embarked on a tour of Europe in which he offered audiences the chance to see this stomach-turning spectacle. His most celebrated demonstration occurred on January 17, 1803 when he applied the poles of a 120-volt battery to the body of the executed murderer George Forster.

When Aldini placed wires on the mouth and ear, the jaw muscles quivered and the murderer's features twisted in a rictus of pain. The left eye opened as if to gaze upon his torturer. For the grand finale Aldini hooked one wire to the ear and plunged the other up the rectum. Forster's corpse broke into a hideous dance. The London Times wrote, "It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life."

Other researchers tried electrifying bodies, with the specific hope of restoring them to life, but with no success."

Here is an interesting video, it was the part of that episode(could not find the actual episode on YouTube).

 

The result of this whole thing was that as the electricity been applied stops the body becomes dead again and thus was been noticed that though the brain is dead as well as the heart but through electricity body parts can be made to move.
Further experimentation led to the discovery of organ transplantation.
If body parts of other human being are transplanted they can still work.Heart and Brain being dead doesn't makes the whole body completely useless.The signals sent by a proper working brain could easily make that dead part of some other body move and work normally!

This episode was quite interesting one.Specially the bizarre experiments performed on the bodies made the episode quite "a must watch thing". It was a very informative episode which made me write a post on my blog for it.
Hope you all will find this interesting too :)

2 comments:

  1. Just think, if it wasn't for some crazy lunatic wanting to make a quick buck off of making a corpse dance with electricity, we might not have defibrillators either, as well as organ transplants.

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    Replies
    1. So true..these bizarre experiments surely led to a very good discovery!

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