You are doing the right things. If the problem is not visible, you'll have to invest in a manual and a voltmeter.

When you said that you got shocked, I presumed that you got shocked while connecting and disconnecting live wires from the primary (small) connections on the coil, not while the engine was being cranked. Is that right?

When you say that you are testing the coil by disconnecting the coil wire at the distributor, you mean that you are pulling the secondary (e.g. high voltage, thick) wire from the middle of the distributor cap and holding it near a good ground to see if a nice blue spark jumps to ground, right? Don't hold the wire more than a quarter inch or so from ground

That is the way that you determine if you have spark from the coil, but but a no-spark condition is usually not a coil failure. There are a lot of components and connections that can fail, resulting in no spark.

If I misunderstood, and you are getting sparks to ground from the coil wire as the engine is being cranked over, but you are not getting sparks at the spark plugs, then the fix will be simple, since it is a failure in the cap or rotor (burned up) or the secondary wire(s) are chaffed and shorting to ground instead of firing the plugs. Crank the engine in a dark garage and watch for sparks,

If you have no spark to ground from the secondary coil wire while cranking, what you will be looking for inside the distributor is signs of wear or failure in the components down in the bottom of the distributor, below the rotor (if you can see anything down there, it may be sealed).

If the center shaft on the distributor is worn such that the shaft rattles sideways more than a few thousandths of an inch, that can cause problems for the signal generator in the bottom of the distributor, but that usually comes on slowly, with erratic misfiring developing over a period of years. (straight up-and-down movement in the shaft is OK)