Rene Laennec: Sounds of the beat
The stethoscope is the most identifiable symbol of a doctor. A medical device for auscultation, or listening to internal sounds of the body, a stethoscope comprises a small disc-shaped resonator placed against the skin, with either one or two tubes connected to two earpieces. It helps physicians gauge the sounds generated by the heart, lungs and intestines.
The invention of this simple, yet ground-breaking device by French physician Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec launched healthcare into the future. Laënnec was born in Quimper, France, on February 17, 1781.
From a young age, he was exposed to the perils of chest diseases, having lost his mother to tuberculosis when he was five. In later years, Laënnec was himself diagnosed with lassitude, pyrexia, and asthma. At age 12, he moved to Nantes, where his uncle, Guillaime-François Laënnec, worked in the university’s faculty of medicine. Laënnec was academically gifted and studied Greek and poetry while pursuing a career in medicine in 1799 at the University of Paris.
There he trained to use sound as a diagnostic aid. On a cold September morning in 1816, Laënnec was walking at Le Louvre Palace in Paris, when he observed two children sending signals to each other through a long piece of solid wood and a pin. With one ear to one end, a child could hear an amplified sound of the pin scratching the opposite end of the wood. A couple of months later, Laënnec was treating a woman with ‘general symptoms of a diseased heart’.
While both the application of his hand to the chest and percussion failed to yield any diagnosis, he recalled the ‘signal from the wood’. He then tightly rolled a sheet of paper, one end of which was placed over the chest and the other over his ear, and lo! He clearly heard the woman’s heartbeat. Laënnec spent the next three years testing various materials to make tubes, perfecting the design and listening to the chest findings of pneumonia patients. He settled for a hollow tube of wood, 3.5 cm x 25 cm, which was the forerunner of the modern stethoscope. Incidentally, Laënnec succumbed to tuberculosis on August 13, 1826.