Adriaan Isebree Moens (1847-1891)

At the end of a brilliant paper' published in 1922 from one of the world's foremost laboratories of physiology-a contribution which, in one swift motion, gathered together the best of nineteenth century material and laid the foundation for the modern study of arterial elasticity-there appeared the following careless citation: "Moens, 'Die Pulskurve', Leiden. 1878. p. 90." In one form or another, this reference to the formula for the velocity of the pulse wave appears here and there in past and current literature as a recurrent after-image-elusive, slightly blurred in detail-of a brief bright flash on the physiological horizon of some sixty years ago. During my search for a broader background in hemodynamics, repeated encounters with this reference, but never with the original, aroused an increasing curiosity. When I discovered a copy of the original monograph in the Yale University Library and read it carefully, I was surprised that such a significant contribution had been dimmed so far as to be a rare find-not even a common library item. The prospect of making it available in an up-to-date form proved attractive, and at the suggestion of Dr. J. F. Fulton an attempt has been made to piece together the story of the author and his book. In spite of the scarcity of material, the search has yielded many points of interest, present as well as historical. Adriaan Isebree Moens, so far as I have been able to ascertain, published only four contributions, all about a single series of researches. In 1877 his doctoral dissertation5 appeared, an octavo of 76 pages, and in the following year he amplified and amended this to make his chief opus, the 145-page monograph,6 Die Pulscurve. One minor point therein furnished the material for an article7 in Pflilger's Arch4v in 1879, and in September of that year he gave a brief review of his work before the Congres periodique international des sciences medicales in Amsterdam. A transcript8 of his speech and of the accompanying discussion was published in the Compte rendu of that meeting. I have not found this member of the Moens family listed in any