English

Noun

sphygmology ‎(uncountable)

1. (medicine, usually historical) The study of the pulse.
   • 1880, American Journal of Philology, page 290:

     Sphygmology only developed in the Alexandrian period, a couple of centuries after Hippocrates.

   • 1895, W. Wood, Heart Studies, Chiefly Clinical: I. The Pulse-sensations: a Study in Tactile Sphygmology:

     Tactile Sphygmology, probably the most ancient among the branches of medical science, is now far behind some of its younger sisters.

   • 1976, Charles M. Leslie, editor, Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study, page 356:

     Also, although sphygmology, or pulse lore, is absent from the Āyurvedic classics, it was well developed in Yunānī medicine, and became the symbol of an Āyurvedic physician's skill. The reputation of sphygmology was such that by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had become more a technique of divination than a rational diagnostic method.

   • 2007, Sean Walsh, Pulse Diagnosis: A Clinical Guide:

     The procedure of pulse palpation is termed sphygmology, literally meaning 'the study of the pulse'.

   • 2014, Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England:

     This emphasis on the skilful feeling of the pulse made sphygmology one area of Renaissance medicine in which the much-vaunted theoretical division between physicians, who did not touch their patients, and surgeons, who routinely got their hands dirty, broke down in practice.

   • 2015, Peter Dendle, editor, Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden:

     This was the case with the diagnostic techniques of uroscopy and sphygmology, and with prognosis, best represented by the Hippocratic Prognosticon.

Synonyms

• pulsology