Alexander Filippovich Samoylov (7 April 1867 – 22 July 1930) was a Russian physiologist and pioneer of electrophysiology and electrocardiography who applied techniques of using the
ECG
Electrocardiography is the process of producing an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG), a recording of the heart's electrical activity. It is an electrogram of the heart which is a graph of voltage versus time of the electrical activity of the hear ...
for diagnostic purposes. He served as a professor at
Kazan University
Kazan (Volga region) Federal University (russian: Казанский (Приволжский) федеральный университет, tt-Cyrl, Казан (Идел буе) федераль университеты) is a public research uni ...
from 1903 until his death.
Samoylov was born in
Odessa
Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...
and after losing his father at an early age, he began to work to earn for the family. He went to the local gymnasium and then joined the
Novorossiisk University to study physics and mathematics. He then changed to study medicine at the
University of Derpt (Tartu), graduating in 1892 in medicine. He obtained a doctorate from St. Petersburg for a thesis on the fate of iron in the animal organism and joined research under
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov ( rus, Ива́н Петро́вич Па́влов, , p=ɪˈvan pʲɪˈtrovʲɪtɕ ˈpavləf, a=Ru-Ivan_Petrovich_Pavlov.ogg; 27 February 1936), was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist, psychologist and physiol ...
on digestion. In 1894 he went to work under
Ivan Sechenov
Doctor Ivan Mikhaylovich Sechenov (russian: Ива́н Миха́йлович Се́ченов; , Tyoply Stan (now Sechenovo) near Simbirsk, Russia – , Moscow), was a Russian psychologist, physiologist, and medical scientist.
The very fa ...
in Moscow. In 1883 he heard a talk by
Nikolai Wedensky on electrical processes in nerves and muscles and their observations using a telephone apparatus. This led him to examine similar processes using a capillary electrometer, designing a drum recorder capturing what he called electrograms. He then went on to study the heart muscles of frogs and was able to detect the electrical impulses associated with the cardiac cycles. In 1904 he met
Willem Einthoven
Willem Einthoven (21 May 1860 – 29 September 1927) was a Dutch doctor and physiologist. He invented the first practical electrocardiograph (ECG or EKG) in 1895 and received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924 for it ("for the dis ...
at the International Physiological Congress in Brussels and then began to make use of a string galvanometer. He published on ECGs and vagus nerve stimulation experiments on frogs in 1908. He began to examine cardiac
arrhythmia
Arrhythmias, also known as cardiac arrhythmias, heart arrhythmias, or dysrhythmias, are irregularities in the heartbeat, including when it is too fast or too slow. A resting heart rate that is too fast – above 100 beats per minute in adults ...
s and their diagnosis. From 1903 to 1930 he worked at the department of zoology at Kazan University. Apart from physiology, he took an interest in music, musical theory and acoustics and was particularly interested in musical notation which he also associated with human muscle action. He died from a heart attack and was buried in Moscow.
References
External links
Biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Samoylov, Alexander Filippovich
1867 births
1930 deaths
Russian physiologists