Just the other day I had the opportunity to have my blood
pressure taken. It was a nice 128 over 72 -- probably due to my
running -- and I was pronounced "healthy as a horse." That was a
real coincidence since the first creature to have its blood
pressure taken was a horse. The year was 1726 as Stephen Hales
took the blood pressure of a horse (we don't know the horse's
name). Four years later our boy, Steve, published
"Haemostaticks," in which he related his experiments on blood
pressure with notes on the mechanical relation of the pressure
to medical conditions including the capacity of different blood
vessels and the velocity of blood flow. Blood kept flowing for
the next century and a quarter, then Karl Friedrich Wilhelm
Ludwig (as a doctor he could afford four names) developed a
device that continually recorded blood pressure, proving that
the circulation of blood is purely mechanical, nothing
mysterious that couldn't be explained by physics. Heartened
(yes, I meant to say that) by Karl etc.'s work, a Fre