What is the medical importance of timing the pulse?
John Floyer was an English physician who is best known for inventing a device for timing the pulse. It was called the pulse watch, and it was breakthrough in that till then, there was no accurate way to measure the pulse rate of patient.
Measuring the pulse rate help a doctor to arrive at a correct diagnosis, and Floyer's watch could be used to accurately count the pulse rate for sixty seconds. This was because, for the firt time, a watch had a second hand to tick off each moment.
Floyer was a prolific writer. His medical writings give abundant evidence both of his own insatiable curiosity, and of his pasion for experiments. His most famous work is 'The Physician's Pulse Watch.' It has over a thousand pages of observations, commentaries, chart, and tables relating to the pulse!