Stephen Hales - Testimony

Testimony

From the Nobel Prize in Medicine acceptance speech given by Werner Forssmann in 1956:

"The credit for carrying out the first catheterization of the heart of a living animal for a definite experimental purpose is due to an English parson, the Reverend Stephen Hales. This scientifically interested layman undertook in Tordington (sic) in 1710, 53 years after the death of William Harvey (1578–1657), the first precise definition of the capacity of a heart. He bled a sheep to death and then led a gun-barrel from the neck vessels into the still-beating heart. Through this, he filled the hollow chambers with molten wax and then measured from the resultant cast the volume of the heartbeat and the minute-volume of the heart, which he calculated from the pulse-beat. Besides this, Stephen Hales was also the first, in 1727, to determine arterial blood pressure, when he measured the rise in a column of blood in a glass tube bound into an artery." —Werner Forssmann,

The genus of trees Halesia is named after him. The American Society of Plant Biologists awards the Stephen Hales Prize annually to a scientist for work in plant biology.