Any medical student will agree that the examination of the pulse is basic to medicine. The pulse is the most fundamental sign of life and its measurement can reveal much about a patient’s condition.
Historically physicians used the pulse as a guide to diagnosis, but concepts of the generation of the pulse were misunderstood. There is also no evidence that the frequency of the pulse was measured. Galen wrote a great deal about the pulse but his judgements were not scientific. It was William Harvey who first described the physiology of the arterial pulse and explained how the pulse is generated.
The first attempt to time the pulse was made by an Italian inventor Santorio Sanctorius in the early 17th century. He invented a device called the ‘pulsilogium’ which used a pendulum and a scale ruler to measure the pulse.
A hundred years later, in 1707, an English physician named Sir John Floyer designed the ‘physician’s pulse watch’ which could accurately count the pulse rate of a patient. His watch featured a second hand, which could run for sixty seconds to count the pulse. It also had a stop mechanism, making it one of the first stop watches in the world! Floyer is credited with popularizing the universal practice among doctors of timing a pulse.
Today, devices such as the pulse oximeter make measuring the pulse rate simple and effortless – a task that may be carried out by anyone, even at home.
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