Before everyone jumps on me, "it is the amps that kill you, not voltage", I understand electricity quite well and in this context, saying something like "handling high amps in a university" is almost certainly not what was taught.
A car battery is capable of hundreds of amps, but if you touch the contacts with your hands, you won't feel a thing, because the voltage is too low to overcome your body's resistance.
I imagine if you wired the leads to your tongue, your tongue would probably explode though.
Which doesn't contradict you at all - I'm just saying treat car batteries with respect.
The risks with low voltages and high amperages are from shorts causing rapid heating.
So while high current does kill you, what causes it is high voltage. What is considered high? Depends on your impedance (ex. are your hands sweaty or dry?).
When dealing with high-current systems, there are safety procedures and concerns, but they are generally different than high-voltage. The systems I have dealt with are more about burns than electrocution. For example accidentally shorting out a fork lift battery can be spectacular in a bad way.
1,000 Amps and 5 volts is dangerous (sort of), but not in an electrocution sense.
So the reason high voltage is more dangerous, if it has sufficient amperage backing it up, is that the higher the voltage, the better its ability to pierce your skins resistance and flow through your body to begin with.
High voltage is inherently dangerous.
If you do this in a vacuum you could get X-rays, and if you do it near your cellphone or laptop you can kill them. But it's not dangerous to your body.
However, high voltage with enough power behind it to burn a Lichtenberg figure through your body can kill you pretty darn quick.
Despite the fact that you’re experiencing the same gravitational acceleration from both, a one meter fall, while being potentially dangerous if you’re not prepared and allowed to land right, is not likely to kill you. A 100 meter fall, on the other hand, is likely not survivable by any means.
"Even low-voltage installers can still experience unsettling shocks, especially if they are working in an unsafe environment, such as if they are ungrounded or standing on a wet spot,” Johnston said. “While it’s unlikely that such shocks will cause serious injury by themselves, they certainly could literally knock someone off balance, which could be a real safety risk if an installer were standing on a ladder.
“In addition, an arc in a low-voltage system has the same potential for igniting explosive materials as one in a 120-plus-volt system. Chapter 5 of the NEC provides rules for installing electrical wiring of any voltage in a hazardous (classified) location, specifically those locations with high concentrations of flammable or combustible liquids, flammable or combustible vapors, conductive and combustible dusts, and so forth.”
In fact, my TENS unit, specifically designed to cause muscle contraction, runs on 9V.
Edit: ah... I see a throwaway account was used, so you will never have to confront your mistake. I wish these were banned.
As a kid we used to test batteries voltage with the tongue, 9V had a distinctive bite, compared to 4.5V. Even today I can tell the output voltage of a multimeter (in its ohm mode)
Youch!
But you are right, likely it was high voltage.