Doctor and Patient by S. Weir (Silas Weir) Mitchell
page 21 of 111 (18%)
page 21 of 111 (18%)
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length of the swinging bar, and set down the pulse as, say ten inches;
next day it might be set at six, and so a record was made. He was soon lost to medicine, but in 1625, Santorini, known to science as Sanctorius, published a curious book, called "Commentaries on Avicenna," in which he figured a variety of similar instruments, called "pulsilograms." We owe to him some of the first accurate studies of diet, and also the discovery of the insensible perspiration, but his pulsilogram was soon forgotten. I think that Harvey but once or twice mentions the number of the pulse even in his physiological books. In the case descriptions of his time and of Sydenham's it is rare to find it noted, and this is true as a rule all through the next century. The exceptions are interesting. In Whytte's works, _circa_ 1745, he not rarely mentions the pulse number in connection with his primary delineation of a case, but after that does not often speak of its subsequent changes in number. The force and other characters of the pulse receive, however, immense attention, and are on the whole more valuable aids than mere numeration; but that cannot nowadays be left out of our calculations, yet as early as the reign of Anne, about 1710, an English physician, Sir John Floyer, wrote an able and now half-forgotten book, quaintly called the "Pulse Watch." I am pretty sure that he was the first to put a minute-hand on a watch to enable him to time the pulse-beat, but nowhere in any English collection have I been able to find one of his watches. Thus aided, he was the first to count the minute's pulse, which is now a sort of recognized and accepted matter as standard of comparison, so that we say merely, the pulse was 60 or 90, as may chance, and do not even speak of the minute. It is as true as strange that this convenient method was practically lost to habitual use in medicine for quite a hundred years. It reappeared in the writings of the time of the great teachers who arose |
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