Organizational development of biomedical engineering.

The evolution of biomedical engineering is traced, beginning with its roots in electrophysiology about 200 years ago. Significant research and professional developments during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s are sketched. Five major events that contributed to these developments are discussed. They are the split between biophysics and bioengineering (1957), S. Talbot's BME study grant (1958-60), the impact of the National Institutes of Health (since 1958), the IEEE ;BME-crisis' (1967/68), and the IEEE Bioengineering Society's founding (1968) and its BME view as an extension of physiology.