Page 231 - Inventions - A Visual Encyclopedia (DK - Smithsonian)

Taking temperature Measuring blood pressure

■ ■ What? Clinical thermometer ■ ■ What? Sphygmomanometer
■ ■ Who? Thomas Clifford Allbutt ■ ■ Who? Samuel Siegfried Karl
■ ■ Where and when? UK, 1866 von Basch
Medical thermometers had been ■ ■ Where and when? Austria, 1881
invented by the mid-19th century— The sphygmomanometer is a simple
but they were more than 12 in device that measures blood pressure.
(30 cm) long and could take Created by an Austrian doctor, it was
up to 20 minutes to provide a improved upon by the Italian doctor
reading. The British physician Scipione Riva Rocci, who added an
Thomas Allbutt improved inflatable cuff that wraps around
their design by creating a a patient’s arm. Inflating the cuff
thermometer that was half squeezes the arm, stopping blood
the size and gave a reading flow. The cuff is then slowly deflated IN GOOD HEALTH
in just five minutes. until the doctor hears the blood
flowing again, and the meter
Allbutt’s thermometer records its pressure.
(left) and its case
(right), c. 1880 Modern sphygmomanometer

Measuring the heart’s electrical activity Checking blood sugar

■ ■ What? Electrocardiograph (ECG or EKG) An electrocardiograph measures the ■ ■ What? Blood-Glucose Meter
■ ■ Who? Willem Einthoven small electric currents produced by ■ ■ Who? Anton “Tom” Clemens
■ ■ Where and when? Netherlands, 1901 the heart, which can help detect the ■ ■ Where and when? US, 1966
presence of heart disease. Its inventor, People with diabetes (a disease in
the Dutch physician Willem Einthoven, which blood sugar is not completely
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine controlled) need to monitor their blood
for his work, in 1924.
sugar levels. Until the 1960s, there
was no easy way to do this. Then, an
American engineer developed a device
that could interpret the readings of
glucose paper strips that change color
Machine reads based on how much sugar a drop of
electric signals from
the patient’s body. blood contains.

Modern blood sugar monitors can
measure blood sugar digitally

◀ EARLY ECG
To use this ECG machine from 1911,
patients had to put their limbs in buckets
of salt water, which acted like electrodes,
conducting the electricity.
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