Willem einthoven
Galvani’s name is also given to the ‘galvanometer’ an instrument for measuring and recording electricity, which is integral to the modern electrocardiogram. The phenomenon was later called ‘galvanism’ after Galvani but today the study of galvanic effects in biology is better known as electrophysiology. Galvani coined the term ‘animal electricity’ to describe the force that activated the muscles of his specimens. Now when one of the persons present touched accidentally and lightly the inner crural nerves of the frog with the point of a scalpel, all the muscles of the legs seemed to contract again and again as if they were affected by powerful cramps.” “I had dissected and prepared a frog in the usual way and while I was attending to something else I laid it on a table on which stood an electrical machine at some distance from its conductor and separated from it by a considerable space. Just over a decade later the Italian Anatomist Luigi Galvani made one of the most important observations in understanding the physiological role of electricity when he noticed the twitching of the muscles of a dissected frog’s leg when touched with a metal scalpel. He used thin strips of tin foil and demonstrated this technique to many colleagues and visitors in 1773. He managed to obtain a visible spark from an electric eel. The first person to make the observation that electricity existed and played a role in the bodies of animals was the British scientist John Walsh. 46 years later the famous polymath Sir Thomas Browne would refine this term and define ‘electricity’ as “the power to attract straws or light bodies, and convert the needle freely placed”. It was in this paper that he introduced the term ‘electrica’ for insulators that hold static electricity. Gilbert published the famous paper ‘De Magnete’ in 1600, his findings suggested that ‘magnetism’ and ‘static electricity’ were separate entities. The long road to the development of the electrocardiogram began with the work of William Gilbert, who was Queen Elizabeth I’s personal physician and President of the College of Physicians (before its Royal Charter). Long before Einthoven’s time, it was known that the beating of the heart produced electrical currents, but there was no instrument available to measure these currents in an acceptable and non-invasive way. He was a talented researcher and it was during his time at Leiden that he would develop the string galvanometer, an invention that would change the face of medicine and cardiology to this very day. The following year he was appointed to the position of Professor of Physiology at the University of Leiden. Einthoven qualified with a degree in medicine in 1885. The family settled in Utrecht and Einthoven would attend the University of Utrecht to study medicine a few years later. When Einthoven was six-years-old his father died and a few years later his mother decided to move back home to Holland with Einthoven and his two brothers and three sisters. His mother was Louise de Vigel, the daughter of the then Director of Finance in the Indies. He was the son of a doctor and army medical officer, Jacob Einthoven, who had been posted to the Indies. Willem Einthoven was born on May 21 st, 1860, in Semarang, a coastal city on the island of Java, which was then part of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). We would not have this remarkable diagnostic tool without a remarkable man, Willem Einthoven. I still look at ECGs on an almost daily basis and it never ceases to amaze me that such a ‘simple’ tool can provide such a wealth of information about a patient. This incident highlighted an educational need and my obsession with the ECG has remained ever since. Whilst working as an A&E SHO many years ago I missed a fairly simple ECG diagnosis, which was fortunately picked up by another doctor that I worked with. After reading that book for the first time ECG interpretation seemed far from easy and I didn’t develop a strong grasp of the subject until many years later. One of the first books I purchased as a medical student was the ‘ECG Made Easy’. ECG interpretation has long been a guilty pleasure of mine.