Stethoscope. History of invention and production

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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
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Stethoscope. History of invention and production

The history of technology, technology, objects around us

Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us

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Stethoscope - a device for listening (auscultation) of the noises of internal organs: lungs, bronchi, heart, blood vessels, intestines, etc. It is a tube in the form of a thin hollow cylinder with a concave shell for the ear.

Stethoscope
Stethophonendoscope

The stethoscope was invented in 1816 by the founder of the diagnostic method of auscultation, Rene Laennec, a French physician, the founder of scientific diagnostics.

René Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec was born in France on February 17, 1781. When he was six years old, his mother died of tuberculosis, and soon his father sent him to his brother. At the age of 12, the boy moved to Nantes, and there, impressed by the work of his other uncle, a professor at the medical faculty of the university, he firmly decided to become a doctor.

From the age of 14, Rene began to study medicine, and when he was 19, he went to Paris, where he continued his studies under the guidance of such luminaries as Marie-Francois Xavier Biche, Guillaume Dupuytren and Jean Nicole Corvisart de Marais, Napoleon Bonaparte's personal physician.

In his dissertation "The Teachings of Hippocrates and Practical Medicine", which Laennec defended in 1804, he developed the idea that one of the most important parts of the art of healing is diagnostics, that is, the study of the patient using objective methods. These included, for example, percussion, tapping with fingers or palm on the patient's chest, which was actively developed by Corvisar, and direct auscultation (from the Latin auscultare - listen carefully), putting the ear to the patient's chest, introduced into practice by Hippocrates. However, Laennec was not a supporter of the latter method: firstly, it was difficult for him to bend down, secondly, he was embarrassed by such a need when examining young women, and thirdly, there were hygienic considerations: many patients at that time had lice.

In 1816, Dr. Laennec was approached by a young lady with symptoms of heart disease. Her physique made it difficult to percussion and palpation, and her age and gender did not allow resorting to the above method. Then Rene remembered that if you put your ear to the end of a wooden stick, you can very clearly hear the sound of a pin hitting its other end. Taking the notebook, he tightly rolled it up and, putting one end to the patient's atrium, and the other to his own ear, with surprise and joy, he heard the heartbeat much louder and more distinct than before.

Laennec called this method mediated auscultation and suggested that it could be useful not only in studying the heartbeat, but also in listening to murmurs in the chest. Soon Laennec abandoned the paper tube, replacing it with a two-piece piece of wood, which he called the stethoscope.

Laennec's stethoscope, 1820

In 1819, after three years of experimentation at the Necker Hospital, the doctor published his classic On the Mediated Auscultation, or A Treatise on the Recognition of Diseases of the Lungs and the Heart, based chiefly on this new method of examination. In it, the author described "easily perceptible signs, with the help of which the diagnosis of almost all diseases of the lungs, pleura and heart became more reliable and thorough than that obtained by surgical diagnosis with a probe or finger."

The first stethoscopes

Before the discovery of x-rays, mediated auscultation was the main method for diagnosing heart and lung diseases. However, it is still relevant now, and the stethoscope (more precisely, its somewhat improved version - the phonendoscope) has become a classic symbol of the medical profession.

Currently, the most commonly used stethophonendoscope has a phonendoscope tip with a membrane at one end, and a stethoscope tip without a membrane at the other.

Author: S.Apresov

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