Learn it well Demo Chapter 1: Introduction

Step by step, the discoveries of giants in the biology, chemistry and physics of electricity set the groundwork for the invention of the first practical electrocardiograph. Improvements in its application and better understanding of the mechanism of passage of an electrical impulse along the membrane of a muscle cell followed. Today the electrocardiogram (EKG) is the first test done to diagnose cardiac disease. You must learn it well because an EKG is only as good as the quality of its interpretation.

  1. Luigi Galvani: Italian physician and physicist in 1780 discovered that muscle could conduct electricity. The galvanometer, an instrument for detecting and measuring small electric currents, is named after him.
  2. Alessandro Volta: Italian physicist and chemist in 1800 invented the electric battery. The volt, the unit of electrical potential, is named after him.
  3. Augustus D. Waller: British physician and physiologist in 1887 started to record electrical potentials from the exposed heart of mammals and realized that cardiac potentials could be detected through the chest wall. He wrote the first teaching textbook that included an illustration of the electrocardiogram.
  4. Willem Einthoven: Dutch doctor and physiologist in 1895 invented the first practical electrocardiograph, described Einthoven’s triangle and named the waves of the EKG P, Q, R, S and T. He named the U wave in 1903. He refined the electrocardiograph with a string galvanometer allowing him to realize that the EKG had value in the diagnosis of human disease. In 1924 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this invention. I use the term EKG, rather than ECG, in homage to Einthoven.
  5. Frank N. Wilson: American cardiologist in 1934 described the augmented limb leads (aVR, aVL and aVF) and in 1944 described the Precordial leads (V1-V6).
  6. Sir John C. Eccles (Australian neurophysiologist), Alan L. Hodgkin (British biophysicist), and Andrew F. Huxley (British physiologist), in 1963 were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their description of the Action Potential, the change in electrical potential associated with the passage of an impulse along the membrane of a muscle cell or nerve cell.
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