Augustus Desiré Waller (1856-1922).

The electrocardiograph is one of the most important instruments with which to examine the human heart and is in constant use all over the world, yet we doubt whether many physicians know who was the first man to demonstrate that the electrical response accompanying the movement of the human heart could easily be shown by a clinical application of a relatively simple instrument. In the early part of the nineteenth century it was known that electrical phenomena accompanied the action of the muscular heart of the lower animals. But no one had demonstrated whether this was the case in the human being since cardiac surgery had not yet begun, and the clinical method demanded a simple technique which could be applied to any patient. The name of the man who first demonstrated the electrical changes that accompanied the movement of the human heart was Augustus Desire Wailer. Waller's father was a practitioner who took up physiology and was the discoverer of the method of degeneration of nerves, so that every student of medicine knows about 'Wallerian degeneration of the nerves'. His name was Augustus Volney Waller and he went to live in Paris where his son Augustus Desire Waller (born on 12 July 1856) spent his childhood and went to the College de G6nave for a time. The father died in 1870 and the mother, probably for financial reasons, took her son to Aberdeen where he was educated as a medical student, qualified in 1878 and obtained his M.D. in 1881. He also studied at Edinburgh. Like his father he was interested in physiology and took this up as his speciality. In 1883 his first appointment was as lecturer on physiology at the School of Medicine for Women in London, where he fell in love with one of the students, the daughter of Sir George Palmer (of Huntley and Palmer Ltd.). They were soon married and lived a very happy life, for the wife helped her husband in his work and her name appears with his in some of his published work. In 1884 he was appointed lecturer in physiology also to St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington, where he lectured until 1903 when he was appointed honorary professor of physiology at a new department ofphysiology at London University. At St. Mary's he had quite a good lecture theatre and adjoining it was a large room where he carried out his researches. He was intensely interested especially in the physiology of nerves and of muscle and he did many operations on many kinds of the lower animals to show the electrical responses which the cardiac muscular action produced. Then in 1887 he suddenly thought that there might be a way of recording the electrical phenomena of the human heart by a simple experiment which gave no inconvenience whatever to the person whose heart was being tested. The result was successful and as soon as possible he demonstrated his findings before a meeting of the Physiological Society. (Proc. physiol. Soc., 8, 1887). The next year, 1888, he was asked to deliver the opening address at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School and to the lay audience in simple language, he devoted a large part of his address to a simple explanation of the discovery he had made. This was recorded in the British Medical Journal, 1888, ii, 751-54, as follows: