When was blood pressure cuff invented

In , he presented a paper to the Imperial Military Academy detailing a new technique for measuring blood pressure that incorporated the use of the newly popularized stethoscope. An early sphygmomanometer of the von Basch design. Harvey Cushing first brought a Riva-Rocci cuff to the United States in as a method to reduce mortality while patients were under anesthesia during his early experiments with intracranial surgeries.

Unlike the thermometer, a tool that was quickly passed to nurses, the sphygmomanometer joined the ranks of other new instruments, such as the stethoscope, that required the much more practiced skills of a physician.

Soon blood pressure measurements replaced pulse palpation as the standard practice for assessing the force of blood flow. After this, blood pressure measurements began to appear with more regularity in clinical case reports and on patient charts.

However, it took years for a standardization of methods to be established and adopted by physicians in the United States. The call for a standardized definition of diastolic blood pressure came from a U. Bureau of Standards in However, it was not until the s that one was established. In addition, more accurate digital or automated devices are now available for use.

Issue: June 10, Read next. June 10, Receive an email when new articles are posted on. Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on. Unfortunately, they may not be as accurate depending on the size of the cuff, placement, etc , and there are a number of cases where the use of these digital machines is inadvisable, such as arteriosclerosis, arrhythmia, pulsus paradoxus, etc; and in these cases a trained operator using an analogue sphygmomanometer is more accurate.

A mercury manometer kindly loaned to us by professor Donald Simpson. It belonged to his aunt, Dr. She studied arts and medicine at the University of Adelaide, taught anatomy in Professor Watson's department, and had a small private practice. The gauge measures to over millimetres of mercury. The rubber bulb is used to inflate the cuff and the meter is contained in the stainless steel container the dial.

The knurled screw on the inflating bulb is used to control the flow of air into and out of the meter. Three blood pressure cuffs. Those attached to the aneroid and mercury manometers are connected to two tubes.

One tube connects to the inflating rubber bulb and the other to the manometer. The top centre one has only one tube, and is connected to a digital manometer. Above is a digital manometer purchased from the local chemist for 90 dollars. The cuff is inflated by a battery operated pump, and the systolic and diastolic pressures are recorded digitally during the deflation and stored.

They reported as reliable and accurate, but some physicians still use mercury or aneroid types. A professional blood pressure meter, which comes with a range of cuff widths for more accurate readings over a wider range of arm diameters, allowing for more accurate readings.

Some modern blood pressure monitors are integrated with other devices, and are able to record pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature and an ECG. These data can be printed or stored for later analysis and reference. Mercury has been known and used since ancient times, with evidence of it in Egyptian tombs dating to around 1, BCE, and its ores used for decoration from at least BCE.

It has been used for many and diverse purposes, perhaps the best know use is as the working fluid in thermometers. Mercury II sulphide, better known as cinnabar , was used to create the red pigment vermillion , which was used in cosmetics in classical Rome and Egypt, to decorate ceramics, in illuminated manuscripts and in other paintings and decorations.

Cinnabar was also used for its colour in funerals. For example, the Mayans considered red to be the colour of death and rebirth, and often covered their dead eg: the tomb of the Red Queen with powdered cinnabar. Metallic mercury was used in fire gilding.

Small grains of gold were heated, and added to hot mercury, and then stirred with an iron rod. This amalgam was then cooled, and the excess mercury was squeezed out. The resulting product could then be painted or smeared onto an object. The amalgam was then carefully heated to evaporate the mercury as a toxic gas, and slightly melt the gold.

As one would imagine, this caused several health problems, and was eventually replaced by electroplating. The object then underwent further processing to bring out gold's luster. Mercury also has several scientific uses too, the most familiar being as the working fluid in thermometers and barometers.

The triple point of mercury By heating the HgO in a vessel, they liberated a gas, which Priestly called " dephlogisticated air ".

It was noted that this gas made candles burn brighter, and mice could survive longer when breathing this gas compared to normal air. The noted English scientist Michael Faraday used a pool of mercury in the first electric motor in Spinning a container of liquid mercury at a constant speed forms a parabolic reflective surface, which can be used as the primary mirror in a liquid mirror telescope.

It does have the ever so slight disadvantage of only pointing upwards. Mercury can also be used as a reference electrode. There have been several industrial uses for mercury. These include the production of chlorine and sodium hydroxide the chloralkali process , or Castner Keller process ; gold and silver mining mercury forms an amalgam with the metals, allowing for easier collection and processing of small particles , in the production of felt , in mercury cell batteries , in detonators mercury fulminate , as a antifungal agent, in anti-fouling paints, and in mercury switches, to name a few.

Mercury vapour is also used in fluorescent lights , much the same as the more famous neon lights. One of the early forms was the Geissler tube. When subjected to a large voltage difference, mercury vapour emits short-wave ultraviolet light. This can be used as is, as in the case of UV and germicidal lamps; or the inside of the tube can be coated with a mixture of phosphors, which are excited by the UV light to emit visible light eg: compact fluorescent lights.

Mercury has had several medicinal uses, of varying effectiveness. One prominent use was in forming amalgams with gold, and used in dentistry to fill cavities, but its use has been severely limited, if not outright banned in recent years.

Other uses included as an ingredient in some laxatives, diaper-rash ointments, topical antiseptics eg: Merbromin, sold as Mercurochrome and Merbromine , and as biological tissue dye. Other less useful, if not outright harmful applications ranged from immortality pills which are credited in the death of the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang , whose tomb, according to legend, has rivers of mercury , as a fertility treatment, and for treating skin ailments.

Mercury was in famously used treat syphilis eg: mercury I chloride aka calomel , and blue mass which was also used in many other conditions too , from the 16 th century, up until the early 20 th when antisyphilitics became available.

Calomel was also used in teething powders until the mid 's. This resulted in many cases of mercury poisoning. Symptoms included itching, rashes, and swelling, and became known as pink disease, or acrodynia. The toxic nature of mercury has been known since antiquity, with slaves and convicts being sent to the Roman cinnabar mines known to have greatly reduced life expectancies.

The German chemist Alfred Stock performed much research on mercury and mercury poisoning around the 's and 30's, and tried to stop the use of mercury and its derivatives. Through his work, Stock was exposed to low levels of mercury vapour over a long time, and endured chronic mild poisoning. He described symptoms of poor memory, lethargy, and depression. The rubber ball was then pressed against the radial artery until the pulse was obliterated and the blood pressure was then estimated using the manometer and palpation was used to determine when the arterial pulse disappeared.

However von Basch's design never had the success it deserved, many physicians of the time being skeptical of this new technology, claiming that it sought to replace traditional ideas of diagnosis based on palpation.

The real problem was however that most doctors questioned the medical usefulness of blood pressure. This did not stop some from attempting to produce a more useful device, such as the sphygmometer by Bloch, which was essentially a spring-loaded tire-gage that was applied to an artery to see how much pressure was necessary to obliterate the pulse. In , Potain improved all of the compression devices available by replacing water and mercury in the devices with air, thus substantially improving their accuracy.

From this moment on, air became the compression medium of choice. Riva-Rocci was a decisive year in the history of blood pressure. Scipione Riva-Rocci developed his first mercury sphygmomanometer. This design was the forerunner of the modern mercury sphygmomanometer. An inflatable cuff was placed over the upper arm to constrict the brachial artery. This cuff was connected to a glass manometer filled with mercury to measure the pressure exerted onto the arm.

Riva-Rocci's sphygmomanometer was then spotted by the American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing while he was traveling through Italy. Seeing the potential benefit of this device, he returned to the US with the design in After the design was modified to be more adapted for clinical use, the sphygmomanometer became commonplace. This year really marks the beginning of modern sphygmomanometry.

Korotkoff However, it is useful to remember that this sphygmomanometer was then only used to determine the systolic blood pressure. The importance of the diastolic pressure had not yet been clearly defined at this time. In , a young Russian surgeon, Nikolai Korotkoff, observed the sounds made by the constriction of the artery, using a stethoscope. Korotkoff found that there were characteristic sounds at certain points in the inflation and deflation of the cuff.