A Brill Calendar: May 21

Einthoven and the Human Heart

Few research centres concentrating on the range of physical sciences equal Leyden during the first third of the 20th century.

Peers in this respect of Holland’s ‘Praesidium Libertatis’ were mainly to be found in Europe’s heartland, pre-Nazi Germany: in Berlin and Göttingen; not to mention Austrian Vienna, Danish Copenhagen and Bohemian Prague. The Nobel Prizes of the period testify to this eminence. It may come as a surprise that Harvard, Yale and Stanford were not yet names ranked on the highest level of professional esteem amongst equals and that a ‘Princeton Institute’ even didn’t exist.

Another momentous change in conditions that prevailed in Academia is a shortening duration of tenure of Professorial Chairs. Both considerations are pertinent to the career of Willem Einthoven (Semarang, Java, Dutch East Indies May 21 1860 – Leyden, Holland, September 29 1927).

A talented youngster, son of Dutch parents in the Colony, he was repatriated to Europe - graduating from Utrecht University in Medical Science, with a special interest in physiology. His study provided Einthoven with a Leyden Chair at the age of 26 - and he would occupy that position more than four decades, until his death. In the second decade – during 1903 – he discovered electrical properties of the human heart; while inventing the string galvanometer as well as designing a practicable instrument he called ‘electrocardiograph’, greatly facilitating the clinical diagnosis of heart disease. Nobel Prizes have been awarded for less.

It is seldom that the value of an academic ‘stabilitas loci’ can be ascertained properly. The scholarly climate in an institution can’t be constructed and optimized at will. Another Willem, Willem Kolff, inventor of the artificial kidney (1945) and artificial heart (1957), graduated as a medical physician from Leyden in 1936, when Einthoven’s spirit and research-style still determined progress in applying physics for medical diagnosis and therapy.