The physician's pulse watch.

SIR JOHN FLOYER (1649-1734) may justifiably be credited with the invention of the first efficient instrument of precision to merit application in clinical practice. His own account of the development of a pulse watch for the accurate measurement of pulse rates in his patients has often been quoted,'7 and the instrument is known to have been commercially available in 1707.8 But Gunn,3 writing in 1934 thought that no specimen had survived, and no example of such a pulse watch constructed in the last years of the seventeenth century has previously been illustrated in medical writings on the subject. In opening his preface to the first volume of The Physician's Pulse Watch, published in 1707, Floyer described the evolution of the instrument: