In 1892, Dr. William Ewart opened his textbook How to Feel the Pulse and What to Feel in It asserting that despite new instruments and mathematical precision, “the pulse has still to be felt.” His caution was not merely technical but ethical. In other words, the practitioner must remain present to the living body, rather than yielding all agency to the instrument. Over a century later, clinicians employ automated devices to register temperature, respiration, blood pressure, and pulse at the press of a button. These tools offer consistency and efficiency, yet they risk diminishing the embodied knowledge, intuition, and human connection once fundamental to care.
This paper traces the historical development of vital-sign measurement from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to show how methods of observation shaped both the phenomenology and ethics of medical practice. Drawing on nursing manuals, early instrument design, and medical treatises, I examine how practitioners learned to “read” vitality through touch, sight, attentiveness, and intuition, using the medical tools as mediators rather than intervenors. The tool, in this sense, is not merely an instrument but a site of negotiation where perception, authority, and empathy converge.
Building on this historical analysis, I am embarking on an applied-history project with nursing students at Red Deer Polytechnic, using archival materials and recreated examinations to explore how manual observation and embodied attentiveness might inform contemporary practice. Attending to historical ways of knowing the living body restores the clinician–patient encounter as a relational act of perception—reframing the clinical encounter as a dialogue between sensing bodies rather than a repository of numerical readings.

Jess Legacy was awarded her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 2018. Her research and academic pursuits explore the threads of metaphysical philosophy and phenomenology woven into the medical humanities. Her current research explores the history of vitals and the relationship between the patient and practitioner intersected upon the materiality of medical devices. She is a multi-disciplinary instructor at Red Deer Polytechnic and teaches courses in History, English and Communications.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations