Help recreate pioneering medical instruments with University of Exeter historians

Historians are hoping to recreate pioneering medical instruments created by an inventor who died before he could reveal the secrets of how they worked.

Santorio Santori changed medicine forever because he showed the importance of measuring the workings of the body. He made a device called pulsilogium - the first instrument of precision in the history of medicine. The instrument possibly inspired Galileo and sparked many other experiments in seventeenth-century Europe.

The Venetian, who lived from 1561 to 1636, made around 30 instruments, including types of scales, and thermometers. He passed away before he fulfilled his promise to explain to other people in detail how the instruments operated. All that survives are drawings and short descriptions in Latin.

Historians from the University of Exeter are now working to build Santorio’s instruments, working with drawings he produced of his instruments. They hope the public will help with this project to recreate how medical treatment began four centuries ago.

With help from engineers and mathematicians, Historians from Exeter have so far recreated one instrument, to measure the pulse. Now they want to reproduce the reminder of Santorio's instrumentation for a major project on measurement and medicine that will shed new light on the beginning of science and its application to medicine.

Santorio was worried other people would steal his ideas, and deliberately didn’t publish anything which would tell them how to use his instruments.

Dr Fabrizio Bigotti, Wellcome Trust Fellow at the Centre for Medical History of the University of Exeter, who is leading the project, said: “We know that the work of Santorio was crucial to the beginning of medical practice as we recognise it today, but we don’t know for sure how he used his instruments, as their application to diagnosis may differ from today’s appreciation of it. All we have are a few notes in Latin which describe the purpose these instrument were made for in very simple terms.

“With help from the University of theThird Age and other professionals working within the University of Exeter, we will recreating and experimenting on seventeenth-century replicas and we are confident that this project will fill in these blanks.

“We are attempting to recreate instruments which have not being seriously studied or recreated over the last 400 years. Santorio was well aware of their importance and sought to keep their functioning secret, for he wanted to be the only person being able to use these instruments. In other words, he wanted to keep control over his inventions and their spreading outside the Veneto. We have so far reconstructed one instrument he made – a gadget called pulsilogium, which measure the pulse frequency – and it really does work and gives very precise readings.”

The public can hear more about the project on January 17, at an event in Room LT3 in the Laver building from 12:30 to 4pm.