"Benjamin Franklin, who is often inaccurately said to have discovered electricity, once shocked himself while trying to electrocute a turkey."

"Franklin believed that 'birds kill’d in this manner eat uncommonly tender,' although modern poultry research... appears to indicate that the flesh of birds killed by electricity might actually be tougher. Franklin’s testimony is one of the earliest accounts of what it feels like to touch the wrong wire. 'I have lately made an experiment in electricity that I desire never to repeat,' he wrote to his brother. Witnesses told him that 'the flash was very great, and the crack as loud as a pistol; yet, my senses being instantly gone, I neither saw the one nor heard the other.' Of the shock itself, he wrote that he felt 'what I know not how to describe—a universal blow through my whole body from my head to my foot, which seemed within as well as without; after which the first thing I took note of was a violent, quick shaking of my body.' As a boy I once shocked myself severely by plugging in a light for my fish tank while my hands were wet. The current that traveled up my arm seemed to make its own path. When it was over, I thought, I’m still here."

That's the second-to-last paragraph of "Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness'/A new biography considers the peculiar life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose discovery that nerve cells are individual completely overthrew the existing theory of the brain" (NYRB).