About Auscultation

The story goes that one day in the 19th Century, René Théophile Laennec,on arriving at a patient's house, asked for a sheet of paper, rolled it into a cylinder and applied one end of it to his patient's chest. Was it out of prudishness ?

Whatever the reason might have been, he was pleasantly surprised to hear the heartbeat very clearly

He realised at once how useful and convenient this method was, to study not only sounds produced by the heart but also all sounds produced by the various movements within the chest cavity, and consequently to examine respiration, the voice, the lungs and fluctuations of the pleura.

Mediate auscultation was born!

From then on he gradually improved his method and his cylinder, first by experimenting with a paper cylinder, and then using a wooden cylinder.

He carried out further experiments at the Hôpital Necker in Paris, and began to study other pulmonary pathologies.

In July 1817, the paper cylinder that had been rolled up and glued was replaced by a one-foot-long cylinder made of three pieces of paper. It was soon abandoned for a solid cylinder, and then a hollow cylinder which resembled an oboe. Laennec successively modified the length, the width and even the diameter of the central canal and tested various materials, finally settling for beech wood.

Towards 1818, he named his instrument the stethoscope. On 15 August 1819, his work "De l'auscultation médiate, ou Traité des diagnostics des maladies des poumons et du coeur fondé principalement sur ce nouveau moyen d'exploration" was published, setting up the basis for a new type of medicine. The use of the stethoscope was introduced in Great Britain in 1825 by Stokes, where it rapidly spread throughout the country and subsequently throughout the world.