From Galvani’s Frog and Norman Jefferis Holter (1914-1983) to the “Implantable Holter Monitors” of Today

Abstract

Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) studied the contractions of the leg muscle of a decapitated frog, becoming the founder of electrophysiology. His work even inspired artists such as Paul Peel (1860–1892), who painted his famous painting “The Young Biologist” in 1891. Galvani’s work was the foundation for the revolutionary inventions of many other scientists, such as Willem Einthoven (1860–1927), the inventor of the electrocardiogram (ECG). The scientist whose name is pronounced daily by almost every cardiologist in the world is Norman Jefferis Holter (1914–1983), who brought together all previous research and merged them with the ideas of Nikola Tesla on the wireless transfer of energy and information. As his most famous invention, the holter ECG monitor is only one derivate of what can be termed Holter’s technology and can be considered the biomedical part of the discipline called telemetry. Today, we use a number of devices that are fundamentally based on Holter’s technology, e.g. implantable loop recorders or pacemaker interrogations. The technique called continuous arterial pressure monitoring is also based on Holter’s technology, and it is an open question whether we can call this method holter blood pressure monitoring. Regardless, the implantable pulmonary artery pressure monitoring device is the result of the fundamental ideas of Holter and Tesla, and, like many other great scientists, Jeff Holter deserves to have his eponym – holter – used in biomedical literature and in the general history of science.

Keywords

• electrocardiography
• 24-hour electrocardiographic monitoring
• holter monitor
• 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring