The Greatest Invention In the History of Medicine: Stethoscope

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“It was the year 1816. A young and slightly overweight female patient applied. She felt a tightness in her chest. Its general symptoms also described heart failure…” Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781-1826) was a French physician. In 1816, he invented the stethoscope, signing one of the most important inventions in human history. Using this new instrument, he studied the sounds produced by the heart and lungs and made a diagnosis with them.
Laënnec would later publish his seminal works, which he studied by listening to the sounds of the human body, first in De L'auscultation Mediate, and would be called the father of clinical auscultation by describing for the first time many lung-related diseases. On a cool September morning in 1816, 35-year-old Dr. Walking through the courtyard of the Louvre Palace in Paris, Laënnec noticed that the two boys were sending signals to each other using a long piece of wood and a needle. While one of the children was putting his ear to the hole of the stick, another was scratching the other end of the stick with a needle, and the sound was loudly heard on the opposite side. In the following years, he would write the story of how he found his invention, which he brought to the history of humanity with this event, in his book De L'auscultation Mediate, with the words he told from his own mouth, but let's go back to the story of the overweight young woman:
An overweight young woman with common signs of heart disease researched and investigated, and she appealed to Dr. Laënnec. Until that day, chest listening was done with the doctor's ear close to the patient's chest and listening directly, but neither the weight nor the gender of this patient was suitable for this. Laënnec is a little embarrassed and a little helpless; On the one hand, he was listening to the patient's complaints and on the other hand, he was thinking about how to listen to the heart sounds. At that moment, he thought of the game the children were playing, and he rolled a piece of paper and placed it on his patient's chest in a way that corresponds to the heart, and began to listen by putting his ear close to the other end. He could now listen to the patient's heart sounds more easily, and this thought paved the way for Laënnec to present an invention that would open new horizons for the medical world. After today, the paper roll would be designed by our doctor as a hollow wooden cylinder and called a stethoscope.
Later, Laënnec would draw a 3-step path before him. First, he would examine chest diseases and clarify these issues, and as a second stage, he would focus on bronchial, lung and pleura (lung membrane) diseases. In the third stage, he would deal with diseases of the heart and its appendages, explaining and classifying many new diseases for the first time.
The stethoscope, which is a combination of the Greek words stetos (chest) and skopein (to look), was invented in 1816 by Rene Laënnec at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. Stethoscope is a device that we use to listen to the sounds in our body. The physical examination process in which we listen to the body with a stethoscope is called auscultation. There is a diaphragm at the bottom of the device, a tubular tube in the middle, and a headset at the top. The diaphragm part is placed on the patient and the sounds in the body vibrate the diaphragm, the acoustic pressure waves formed travel in the tube and reach the ears of the listener and spread there. The stethoscope acts as a purely mechanical amplifier.

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