We like to think that medicine is an exact science, as the adjective "haphazard" doesn't exactly inspire confidence when it's applied to people who have the power to stick their fingers up our ugly bits. But it turns out that some of the greatest discoveries in modern medicine didn't come about as a consequence of hundreds of dedicated doctors slaving away for hours in a lab. They occurred because people are often stupid, lazy, incompetent, unlucky or accident-prone.

5 Luigi Galvani, Frogs and Electricity Accidentally Discover How Muscles Work

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There's something intrinsically hilarious about the life of Luigi Galvani. First off, his ringlets were so fat you could stuff hot dogs into them. Secondly, he hailed from the University of Bologna. Yeah, the school is historical and prestigious and blah blah blah. Nothing changes the fact that "bologna" is right there in the name.

Via Wikimedia Commons

We weren't kidding, man. Bun and all.

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And finally, Galvani loved dissecting him some frogs. Like, all the time. If dead frogs were Mario, Luigi Galvani would be Luigi. So one day, Luigi was just doin' how he do, dissecting a frog to prove that its balls were in its legs, when he forgot that the metal table holding the splayed dead frog was the same metal table previously used for static electricity experiments. And that his dissecting instruments were also made of metal. So when Galvani's assistant touched the frog's sciatic nerve with his electrically charged scalpel, that dead frog leg twitched like it was suffering withdrawal from frog meth.

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The Discovery

It wasn't the accurate location of frog testicles, that's for sure. After a few more experiments involving electricity and frog legs ...

Via msresistances.com and Wikimedia Commons

... that smelled like chicken ...

... Luigi Galvani and his assistant were the first people to see that it's electricity, not air or water, that moves muscles. This was HUGE, because up to this point, the smartest guys in the world believed that nerves were hollow tubes that functioned as channels for something and that this something was what spurred muscles into action.