Taking the Pulse - The Emergence of a New Diagnostic Method

What is a more familiar bodily phenomenon than the pulse? We are so accustomed to the sensation of our pulse that it is easy to think this was always a part of human experience. But what if this was not always the case? When did physicians learn about the pulse, and how did it become so central to medical practice and to our own experiences of our bodies?

Let’s turn to Dr. Yakir Paz, who is interviewing Dr. Orly Lewis, a historian of medicine in antiquity.

image: Erasistratus, a physician, realizing that Antiochus's (son of Seleucus I) illness is lovesickness for his stepmother Stratonice, by observing that Antiochus's pulse rose whenever he saw her. Colored engraving by W.W. Ryland, 1772, after Pietro da Cortona. Credit: Wellcome Collection.