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The power of torpedo fish as a pathological model to the understanding of nervous transmission in Antiquity.

Debru A

Université Paris-5, 10, av. Villars, 75007 Paris, France. armaelle.debru@noos.fr

The torpedo effect was known long before electricity was discovered. How was it explained? In early accounts on the subject, Emil du Bois-Reymond found remarkable observations and hypotheses. In Antiquity, zoological interest is illustrated by Aristotle and followers, who were intrigued by torpedo's behaviour and capacity to act from a distance. Alexandrian physicists were more interested in the propagation, as for light, of its effect in matter, conceived as either corpuscular or continuous. The theory of nervous action is linked to these conceptions and separated in various hypotheses among which that on qualitative alteration. However, the medical approach of toxicology takes over this debate and brings back torpedo's property in the frame of pathology.

Published 29 May 2006 in C R Biol, 329(5): 298-302.
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