Biography

 Augustus Desiré Waller was born in Paris in 1856 and was the son of prominent scientist Augustus Volney Waller (of Wallerian nerve degeneration fame). Upon the death of his father in 1870, his family moved to Scotland where he completed his education, studying medicine at Aberdeen and Edinbergh and received the MD in 1881. His first professional appointment was in 1883 as physiology lecturer at the School of Medicine for Women in London, where he also met and married one of his students, Alice Palmer, who participated in his research and was coauthor of some manuscripts. In 1884 he was also appointed lecturer in physiology at St. Mary's Hospital, with which he remained associated for the remainder of his life. In 1903 he was appointed as honorary professor of physiology at London University and shortly thereafter, a consulting cardiologist at the National Heart Hospital.

During his wide ranging researches on muscle and nerve activity, Waller became persuaded that the broadly recognized electrical currents associated with muscular activity and nerve conduction were integral to the life process. He was able to record the electrical activity of the living mammalian heart from the body surface and in some of the recordings associating that recording with the mechanical apex beat. While some of the recording devices were of his own devising he used primarily the Lippmann capillary electrometer which consisted largely of a mercury column supporting a column of dilute sulphuric acid. With the passage of minute electric currents through the instrument, the mercury column fluctuates. A light transilluminating the fluctuating level of the mercury meniscus surface projected its movements. The capillary electrometer was crude, insufficiently sensitive to electric currents and sensitive to disturbance. This discovery that cardiac mechanical activity is associated with the generation of minute electrical currents which Waller named "electrogram" defined the remainder of Waller's career, as well as being the beginning of a search in the physiologic community for better techniques for their detection and recording. To record the light beam photographically he devised a technique of slowly moving a glass photographic plate past the light beam at a constant speed, using a spring motor driven toy train. (Willem Einthoven was inspired to improve on the Waller electrograms with a more robust and sensitive string galvanometer and initially dropping the photographic plates at a controlled speed, initially in a gravity and then a motor driven track.)

The first published account of human electrocardiography was Waller's 1887 report, "A Demonstration on Man of Electromotive Changes Accompanying the Heart's Beat". In 1888 in a lecture to a lay audience he stated that "…I am going to describe how the heart of man can be shown to act as an electrical organ…" During 1889 he demonstrated his findings before the Royal Society and in 1892 was elected to Fellowship in the Society. Initially, he said he did not imagine that electrocardiography would find extensive use in the medical and hospital setting unless to record a rare cardiac anomaly. He lectured widely in Europe and Britain about these findings, using as a subject from which to record the "electrogram", his bull dog Jimmy who would stand with his paws in four pans of saline from which the electrical potentials were recorded. As other physicians, especially Thomas Lewis, demonstrated the clinical utility of electrocardiography he became persuaded of its potential and in 1917 presented a paper before the Physiological Society of London titled, "A Preliminary Survey of 2,000 Electrocardiograms". It is widely regarded that this presentation included the first usage of the term "electrocardiogram."

Sir Thomas Lewis eulogized Waller and was quoted by Professor W. D. Halliburton in an obituary for the Royal Society as follows: May I add a few words of tribute to the memory of Prof. Waller whose death will be much regretted by both physiologists and physicians in this country and in many other lands. He was a man of unusually keen intellect, and had been for many years a notable figure in British physiology. His brilliant powers of exposition will long render his demonstrations at the Physiological Society memorable. His early work on electro-physiology was extensive, thorough, and is well known. He was the first to show that the currents set up by the beating of the human heart can be recorded; he was the first to obtain a human electro-cardiogram, this has been the main though by no means his sole contribution to the science of experimental medicine. The discovery long preceded the introduction of the string galvanometer and, was the more remarkable in that it was accomplished in the eighties.

Over the course of his career, Waller wrote a total of about 245 articles on topics ranging from ECG and other cardiac studies to anesthesia, vision and hearing, and botany. He wrote 10 books including "Eight Lectures on The Signs of Life from their Electrical Aspect" (1903) and "The Electrical Action of the Human Heart" (1922).

Waller's marriage to Alice Palmer produced four children, none of whom married. Thus, no direct descendents exist. His legacy remains, however, not only in the cardio-pulmonary unit at St. Mary's, which bears his name but to the everyday use of the electrocardiogram. Some of his original recordings can be found in the museum at St. Mary's and still others at the British Cardiac Society.