René Laennec (1781 – 1826) was a thorough gentleman. In retrospect, he’d turn out to be a knight in shining white apron.
In 1816, the young French doctor was worried that he could be getting ”inappropriately close’ to a young patient who had been suffering from chest infection. He would recall later, ”…. I was consulted by a young woman laboring under general symptoms of diseased heart, and in whose case percussion and the application of the hand were of little avail on account of the great degree of fatness.The… method of direct auscultation [was] being rendered inadmissible by the age and sex of the patient…”
Laennec resolved the problem of medical diagnostics and social decency in one shot. He ”rolled a quire of paper into a kind of cylinder and applied one end of it to the region of the heart and the other to my ear ”
Within a few months, he had invented that universal symbol of medical science – the STETHOSCOPE
Reference:
- https://www.medisave.co.uk/blog/the-invention-of-the-stethoscope/
- https://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com/2015/04/21/laennecs-baton-a-short-history-of-the-stethoscope/
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARene-Theophile-Hyacinthe_Laennec_(1781-1826)_with_stethoscope.jpg
Author Profile:
Anirban Mitra, Ph.D.
Anirban Mitra did his PhD from the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru and is now a teacher of biology, based in Kolkata. His interests range from biological evolution to history of science and facets of India’s past.
Blog Design and infographics: Abhinav Dey
Featured Image: Ipsa Jain
This work by ClubSciWri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
