Riva-Rocci's cuff sphygmomanometer

Scipione Riva-Rocci, the son of a village doctor, was born in Almese near Turin in 1863, graduated in medicine at Turin in 1888 and became an assistant in Carlo Forlanini's clinic. There he studied breathing in support of Forlanini's artificial pneumothorax for tuberculosis and wrote on fever, diabetes and stomach disorders.

Instruments for measuring blood pressure already existed. Italy's national heritage catalogue credits Angelo Mosso with a sphygmomanometer in 1876 and notes that Samuel von Basch patented one in 1881. In 1896 Riva-Rocci described a new model in the Gazzetta medica di Torino: a column of mercury connected to an inflatable cuff that went around the upper arm and compressed the brachial artery. It was easier to use than its predecessors, and according to Treccani's Dizionario Biografico it gave a precise reading without causing the patient pain.

The design was quickly taken as the base model for later instruments. In 1901 Harvey Cushing, a pioneer of neurosurgery, saw it at the San Matteo hospital in Pavia, where Riva-Rocci had moved with Forlanini in 1898. Cushing saw that it could help reduce deaths from anesthesia, especially in operations inside the skull, and he helped bring it into use in the United States.

Nikolai Korotkov later refined the method by listening for sounds over the brachial artery as the cuff was let down. Riva-Rocci taught at Pavia until 1924 and from 1906 also taught pediatrics, setting up a new children's clinic at the San Matteo in 1912 and 1913. The Science Museum in London holds a Riva-Rocci instrument made about 1905 and modified by Charles Martin, and it describes the cuff and small rubber pump as the standard way of measuring blood pressure.