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Who found the stethoscope

Long before Hippocrates (ca. 460-380 B.C.) taught his disciples the importance of listening to breath sounds, references to it appeared in the Ebers papyrus (ca. 1500 B.C.) and the Hindu Vedas (ca. 1500-1200 B.C).

But it was not until the early 19th century that physicians began to systematically explore the precise clinical meanings of both breath and heart sounds by correlating data gathered during patient examinations with what was ultimately discovered on the autopsy table.

René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec

This was the period when Paris reigned as the international centre for all things medical. Drawing from a system of hospitals affording limitless access to what was then referred to as "clinical material,"the Paris medical school boasted a talented faculty that represented the vanguard of medicine.

One of the brightest stars in this firmament was the man credited with creating the stethoscope, René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec(1781-1826). Before he assumed the position of chief of service at the teeming Necker Hospital in 1816, Laënnec became adept at a technique called percussion, which involves striking the chest with one's fingertips in search of pathologic processes.

One day in the fall of 1816, Laënnec was scheduled to examine a young woman who had been "labouring under general symptoms of diseased heart."

He was running late, and so took a shortcut through the courtyard of the Louvre, where a group of laughing children playing atop a pile of old timber caught his attention.

A pair of youngsters toying with a long, narrow wooden beam especially entranced Laënnec. While one child held the beam to his ear, the other tapped nails against the opposite end; all had a jolly good time transmitting sound.

Whether or not this instructive event ever occurred, Laënnec would later record that his invention was inspired by the science of acoustics and, in particular, the fact that sound is "conveyed through certain solid bodies, as when we hear the scratch of a pin at one end of a piece of wood, on applying our ear to the other." Upon entering his patient's room, Laënnec asked for a quire of paper and rolled it into a cylinder. Placing it against the patient's chest, the doctor was amazed to find how well he could hear the sound of the patient's heartbeat. It was with this idea in mind that the stethoscope was made. -Internet

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