Genesis 1: 1 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.
Laennec was so impressed with the results of his impromptu experiment that he went on to build a wooden version of it that could be carried around and used on patients during his day-to-day medical practice. His first instrument was a 25 cm by 2.5 cm hollow wooden cylinder, which he later refined to consist of three detachable parts. He called his creation the stethoscope from the Greek words ‘stethos’ for chest and ‘scopos’ for examination.
He presented his findings in a talk at the Académie de Médecine in 1819 and use of the stethoscope was rapidly adopted by physicians, initially across Europe and then later across the Atlantic in the US. Sadly Laennec died just a few years later in 1826 at the age of just 45. He died from tuberculosis, a disease which he had spent much of his career treating.
Before his death, he called the invention of the stethoscope
“The greatest legacy of my Life”.
Mononaural To Binaural
1819 To 1841
First Binaural Stethoscope was invented by Dr Cammann in 1841
Evolution Of Stethoscope
Mononaural To Binaural To Electronic To Ultrasound Stethoscope
Snapshot
