Abstract
Any appraisal of today's highlights in cardiology must look back on pioneering achievements
in the past. The history of this important discipline of internal medicine shows us
that the most important steps in its development were temporarily very distant from
each other. As early as 1622 William Harvey for the first time described the blood circulation; in 1733 Steven Hales reported on his experiment of blood pressure measurement, but it was not before 1895
that the pediatrician Scipione Riva-Rocci presented his technique for bloodless registration of the systolic and diastolic
blood pressure. This method—named after him—was corroborated by the work of the Russian
physiologist N. S. Korotkow in 1905. In 1903 Willem Einthoven recorded electrical currents in the heart, and 1910 was the year of birth of clinical
electrocardiography introduced by Sir Thomas Lewis.
