Herman Carel Burger

Herman Carel Burger (1 June 1893 – 28 December 1965) was a Dutch physicist who pioneered the field of electrocardiography and medical physics. A system of positioning of electrodes for electrocardiography is known as Burger's triangle.^[1]

Burger was born in Utrecht and was interested in both physics and medicine. He received a PhD in 1918 from Utrecht University with studies on crystal formation and then went to work at Philips in Eindhoven. He also continued to work at Utrecht University and became a reader in 1927 and began to teach physics to students of medicine. After World War II he began to take an interest in electricity and the human body. He chose a triangle of points for electrical measurement which formed an asymmetric triangle, the so-called Burger's triangle, which departed from the previous idea of Willem Einthoven which was an equilateral triangle.^[2][3] He also pioneered the use of dyes in blood to study circulation.^[4][5]

Burger died of a heart infarction, a year after the death of his wife. He willed his body away for science.^[5]

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