The stethoscope may be the one instrument common
to all doctors and no other symbol so strongly identifies a doctor
than these curiously shaped instruments dangling around our necks
like talismans. Who brought this remarkable invention to our medical community,
what is its history, where, when, and why?
THE HISTORY OF THE STETHOSCOPE begins in 1816. It was invented by Rene Laennec
, a physician born on February
17th 1781 (the same year as the Battle of Yorkshire in the American
Revolution), in Quimper France. He described his invention as follows
(translated from French):
"In 1816 I was consulted by a young woman presenting with
general symptoms of disease of the heart. Owing to her stoutness,
little information could be gathered by application of the hand and
percussion. The patient's age and gender did not permit me to resort
to the kind of examination I have described (placing my ear to her
chest). I recalled a well known acoustic phenomenon: if you place
your ear against one end of a wood beam the scratch of a pin at the
other end is distinctly audible. It occurred to me that this physical
property might serve a useful purpose in the case I was dealing with.
I then tightly rolled a sheet of paper, one end of which I placed
over the precordium (chest) and my ear to the other.
I was surprised and elated to be able to hear the beating of her heart
with far greater clearness than I ever had with direct application
of my ear. I immediately saw that this might become an indispensable
method for studying, not only the beating of the heart, but all movements
able of producing sound in the chest cavity."
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Laennec's
Design for a Stethoscope
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Laennec then spent the next three years perfecting
his design and listening to the chest findings of patients with pneumonia
and comparing what he heard to their autopsy findings. From this he
published the first seminal work on the use of listening to body sounds
entitled De L'auscultation Mediate in 1819 at thirty-eight
years old. Ironically, Laennec himself died of tuberculosis on August
13th, 1826.
What we recognize today as a stethoscope, the 'two ear' type, was
invented in 1852 by the American George Cammann. More recently,
stethoscopes with microphones and amplifiers have been experimented
with but have not been widely adopted. And here ends the story of
the stethoscope, for now...
