Find out how René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816.
Can you imaging a doctor without a stethoscope? A Doctor would have to put their ear or hand on a patient's chest, to hear a heartbeat. Well that was the case until 1816 when René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec invented the stethoscope.
René Laennec was born on 17 February, 1781, in Quimper, France. Today Google honours the french physician with a doodle, on what would have been his 235th birthday.
In 1816, while treating a young female patient showing symptoms of heart disease, he taught it would be inappropriate to use the conventional methods (at the time) of placing his hand or ear on the patient's chest on account of the patient being overweight. It was at that time that he remembered something that would change the way doctors practice medicine forever.
In the De l'Auscultation Médiate, René Laennec wrote, “I happened to recollect a simple and well-known fact in acoustics, ... the great distinctness with which we hear the scratch of a pin at one end of a piece of wood on applying our ear to the other.”
“Immediately, on this suggestion, I 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, and was not a little surprised and pleased to find that I could thereby perceive the action of the heart in a manner much more clear and distinct than I had ever been able to do by the immediate application of my ear.” René Laennec added.
The first stethoscopes were made from wood, cylindrical-shaped with a microphone and earpiece attached at either ends.
Apart from bringing forth the most iconic tool of a doctor, he coined the term 'melanoma and the disease ‘cirrhosis.’
He also studied tuberculosis which he coincidentally died from on 13 August 1826 in Ploaré, France. He was only 46 years old.
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 "René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec with stethoscope")
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