With the introduction of auscultation in 1819 by Laennec, it soon became clear that in heart failure patients with irregular heartbeat not all heartbeats lead to a palpable peripheral pulse. This phenomenon was initially referred to as "pulsus deficiens", thus extending the 26 different types of pulse that Galen had characterized to date. However, this definition was not used uniformly.
It was not until 1912 that Robinson and Draper were the first to call the phenomenon of a missing peripheral pulse a "pulse deficit".