The history of precision in medicine is worth the telling, if only to
teach the lay reader something of that vast struggle to know the truths
of disease, which is little understood beyond the ranks of the most
scholarly of my profession. The first step was due to Galileo. In 1585
he used his pendulum to record the pulse, in a fashion at which we smile
to-day, and yet what he tried to do was the birth of precision in
medicine. Keeping a finger on the pulse, he set a pendulum in motion. If
it went faster than the pulse, he put the weight a little lower, or as I
may state it to make it clearer, he lengthened the pendulum. At last
when it moved so as to beat equal time with the pulse, he measured the
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.
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