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In September 1961, the First International Congress of Electromyography (EMG) was held at the University of Pavia. This event proved to be a sort of foundation stone for the further development of EMG as an organized field. Many of the most distinguished clinical neurophysiologists attended this congress and took an active part in it, delivering important lectures and scientific communications on the various aspects of EMG, including electroneurography. They included: Henri Gastaut, Fritz Buchthal, Jean Edouard Desmedt, Eric Kugelberg, Roger W. Gilliatt, John A. Simpson, Albrecht Struppler, Irena Hausmanowa-Petrusewicz, and Howard Edward Lambert. The congress was organized by Paolo Pinelli, at the time a young and brilliant clinical neurophysiologist who had learned the EMG procedure in Copenhagen under the guidance of Fritz Buchthal. Various scientific and social aspects of this important congress are outlined in this paper.

Among the most fascinating riddles in neuroscience is the one concerning the poor regeneration capacity of the adult mammalian CNS. A central aetiological hypothesis for the lack of axonal regeneration in the CNS concerns the inhibitory role of myelin components of the white matter. The main exponent of this hypothesis in the 1980s and 1990s has been Martin Schwab, although before him Martin Berry and others had suggested an inhibitory role for CNS myelin. However, a hypothesis for a negative neurotropic action exerted by CNS white matter was formulated by Lugaro already in 1906. This article is a belated tribute to Lugaro's original contribution in the field of neuroregeneration.

Luigi Galvani became one of the greatest scientists of the 18th century with his research and the development of his theory on animal electricity. His work was appreciated by many scientists. Nevertheless, it gave rise to one of the most passionate scientific debates in history when Alessandro Volta postulated that Galvani had confused intrinsic animal electricity with small currents produced by metals. This debate would result in the creation of electrophysiology, electromagnetism, electrochemistry and the electrical battery. Galvani responded to each of the postulated theories of Volta giving irrefutable proof of the involvement of electricity in the contraction of muscles. However, his work was subsequently abandoned and silenced for many years but his ideas and theories were finally confirmed by the creation of new instruments and the interest of new scientists who helped position Galvani as the father of electrophysiology.

Although the past 25 years have witnessed increasing interest in human brain stimulation, its historical development is marked by phases of fascination and obscurity. Its history dates back to the 19th century when the first reports describing application of an electric current to an isolated point on the exposed brain made brain stimulation a major neuroscientific novelty of the time. In this article, the authors present and discuss a number of early experiments involving electrical stimulation of the exposed human brain. In this important, albeit unexplored, historical chapter of brain stimulation, the 3 investigators, Bartholow, Sciamanna, and Alberti, were the first to reproduce findings in animals with electrical brain stimulation in humans.

The Renaissance saw the first systematic anatomical and physiological studies of the brain and human body because scientists, for the first time in centuries, were allowed to dissect human bodies for study. Renaissance artists were frequently found at dissections and their attention to detail can be observed in their products. Scientists themselves were increasingly artistic, and they created astonishing anatomical models and illustrations that can still be studied. The cross-fertilization of art and science in the Renaissance resulted in more scientific analyses of neuroanatomy as well as more creative ways in which such analyses could be depicted. Both art and science benefited from the reciprocal ways in which the two influenced each other even as they provided new ways of explaining the mysteries of the human body and mind.

In developing neurohistology, neither Golgi nor Cajal paid much attention to the findings of the physiologists who at that time worked on the nervous system, possibly because they felt that the microscope alone could answer functional as well as structural questions. Cajal was personally acquainted with Sherrington but surprisingly did not use his findings on the role of synapses in reflex mechanisms to support the neuron theory. Golgi did not trust the physiologists' concepts in general and therefore did not pay attention to the physiological literature, an attitude rightly criticized by Luciani, a prominent neurophysiologist of those times. In recent years, attempts to resurrect Golgi's theory of the diffuse nerve net have been based on the evidence of extrasynaptic communications between neurons through tight junctions or the so-called volume transmission. Here are mentioned earlier efforts to reconcile the neuron theory with Golgi's theory by Antonio Pensa, a pupil of Golgi who influenced the scientific development of the great neurophysiologist Giuseppe Moruzzi. The article also argues that the known mechanisms of extrasynaptic communication by no means prove the existence of a neural net a la Golgi, that is of a net predicated on a fusion of neurites. The greatness of Golgi must be sought in his immortal contributions to various fields of biology and medicine, rather than in his only major scientific mistake: a stubborn defense of an indefensible theory.

The historiography of psychology has highlighted how in Italy experts both from the field of philosophy and above all from that of medicine have contributed to the foundation of scientific psychology. The "project of experimental psychology" took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks especially to the work of physiologists, neurophysiologists, neurohistologists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, such as Tamburini, Seppilli, Luciani, Golgi, Buccola, Ferrari, Morselli, Mosso, Kiesow, etc. These experts in their various fields were all involved in the attempt to redefine psychology as a natural science on a par with the other scientific disciplines and, therefore, to identify and delimit its proper object of study, while consequently developing its relative "quantitative" methods with reference to those of psychophysics, psychophysiology, and psycochronometry. This attempt developed particularly in Reggio Emilia and in Turin. In the San Lazzaro Mental Hospital of Reggio Emilia directed by Augusto Tamburini, there was an important cultural movement regarding research and training, which culminated in Gabriele Buccola's systematic experimental research on reaction times. In Turin, instead, the presence of the psychiatrist Enrico Morselli and the physiologist Angelo Mosso favoured the development of a Wundtian-style experimental psychology. The type of investigations conducted in these research centres reflects the interests of their authors, but it also reveals their common objective of founding a new psychological discipline that would have "scientific" characteristics.

Analogy between testicles and brain is an ancient one, and it has often taken the form of an analogy between semen and 'succus nerveus' (a liquid substance produced by the brain and circulating in the nerves). The paper deals with an Early Modern version of the analogy, outlined by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli in his De motu animalium (1680-81). Elements from the medical tradition of Antiquity and Renaissance can be traced in Borelli's system, together with the effort towards the creation of a mechanico-chemical model of the machine of the living organism. Nervous and seminal fluids are supposed to animate and perfect the machine.

This is an appreciation of 3 scientists who made historic contributions toward understanding bio-electrical activity. The discoveries of Galvani and Volta, who were contemporaries two hundred years ago, continue as basic supports in advancing the strength and health of all mankind. They, nevertheless, had political and scientific disagreements that still linger. The third scientist was our contemporary, Alexander Forbes who, throughout most of the 20th century, continued to increase our understanding of electrical activity in the nervous system.

A practical science of the brain scarcely existed before the 17th century except in terms of gross anatomy. In all countries vitalistic concepts held sway, yielding only slowly to more materialistic views. These developed at a different pace in different countries, due, in each case, to the dominant philosophies of the time: the English empiricists; the French Enlightenment; the Italian and German schools of experimental neurophysiology. The last to accept the materialists' viewpoints was Russia, whose scientists imported them from their training in Western Europe in the 19th century. A brief outline is given of how the history of brain science parallels the history of ideas in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.