Willem Einthoven was a renowned Dutch physiologist who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1924 for inventing the first practical electrocardiogram. He was born in Dutch East Indies but the family returned to Netherlands after his father’s premature death and settled at Utrecht, where he was first admitted to the Hogere Burgerschoo and then to the University of Utrecht. Ultimately, he secured a medical degree from the University of Utrecht and began his career as an assistant to a renowned ophthalmologist at the famous eye-hospital “Gasthuis voor Ooglidders”. Later he shifted to the University of Leiden as Professor of Physiology and remained there until his death. Towards the end of the nineteenth century he embarked on a new project, which would ultimately make him famous. Sometime now, he was asked to accurately register the heart sound of human being; but the tool available at that time was not adequate for that purpose. So after few years of hard work, he devised his own string galvanometer, which could measure the heartbeats and record them graphically. Though a little bulky, it was the first practical electrocardiogram, which later became an essential tool for doctors dealing with varied types of heart diseases. Much later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this invention.
