The soil and seeds of hypertension are those provided by an understanding of the circulation originating from William Harvey’s work in the early 1600s. The truncal position historically is accorded to the British scientist and curate, Stephen Hales, who first measured blood pressure in animals directly in the 1730s. The development of instrumentation for indirect blood pressure measurement progressed through the late 1800s, culminating in Nikolai Korotkoff’s auscultatory method reported in 1905. Once the trunk of measurement was established, the first branches representing early understanding of blood pressure and disease sprouted by the early 20th century. However, blooming of these branches to establish the broad canopy representing our modern understanding of the pathophysiology of blood pressure has continued to the present...