Santorio Santorio

Santorio Santorio, born Santorio Santori and known in English as Sanctorius of Padua, was an Italian physician and professor who brought measurement into the study of the living body. Born in 1561 in Capodistria, he took his medical degree at Padua in 1585, practised in Venice and held the chair of theoretical medicine at Padua from 1611 to 1624. He devised the pulsilogium for counting the pulse and a clinical thermoscope, and he built a weighing chair to study the body's insensible perspiration over long periods. His De Statica Medicina of 1614 influenced generations of physicians, and he is often called the father of experimental physiology.