Today In Medical History – September 9, 2017

September 9, 2017:
(1) (1737) Italian physician, physicist, biologist Luigi Galvani is born. He is known for discovering animal electricity by twitching the leg muscles of frogs by striking them with electrical sparks.
(2) (1923) American physician and medical researcher Daniel Carleton Gajdusek is born. He shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on kuru, the first human prion disease which was shown to be infectious.
(3) (1924) American surgeon Russell Marion Nelson is born. He created his own heart-lung bypass machine and used it to perform the first open-heart surgery in Utah.