Horatio Burt Williams

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Horatio Burt Williams (born September 17, 1877 in Utica , New York , † November 1, 1955 in New York City ) was an American physiologist . He was a professor of physiology at Columbia University and a pioneer in clinical electrophysiology .

Williams studied engineering and then medicine at Syracuse University and completed his clinical training (internship) at the New York Hospital House of Relief. He then practiced as a doctor in New York City, but quickly gave up and became an assistant in physiology at Cornell University Medical School. In 1915 he became an Assistant Professor and in 1916 Dalton Professor at Columbia University Medical School. In 1942 he retired.

After the invention of the electrocardiograph by Willem Einthoven in 1903, the device was initially produced by the Cambridge Instrument Company ( Horace Darwin ) from 1911 . Williams visited Einthoven in his Leiden laboratory in 1911 with his mechanic Charles Hindle and developed the process further in the USA, where Hindle founded a production company in New York, which merged with Cambridge Instruments in 1922. In 1915 they delivered their first instrument to Alfred E. Cohn at the Rockefeller Institute. Williams published the first paper on electrocardiograms (EKG) in the US with Walter James.

He also determined the necessary current / voltage parameters to generate ventricular fibrillation with 60 Hertz current via body electrodes.

In 1926 he was Gibbs Lecturer .

literature

  • LA Geddes, A. Wald Retrospectroscope: Horatio B. Williams and the first electrocardiographs made in the United States , IEEE Engineering in Biology and Medicine Magazine, Volume 19, 2000, pp. 117-121, abstract
  • ECG timeline
  • E. Stein The Electrocardiogram , WB Saunders 1976
  • George Burch, Nicholas DePasquale A history of Electrocardiography , Chicago, Year Book Medical 1964

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alfred E. Cohn brought the first electrocardiograph (thread galvanometer) according to Einthoven to the USA in 1909, The first Electrocardiograph in the United States , Rockefeller University Hospital
  2. ^ The device is on display today at the Smithsonian Institution
  3. ^ Walter James, Horatio Williams The electrocardiagram in clinical medicine , Am. J. Med. Sci., Vol. 140, 1910, pp. 408-421
personal data
SURNAME Williams, Horatio Burt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physiologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 17, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Utica
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 1955
Place of death New York City