Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Rene Laennec

  • Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau and aeration of the White Plague

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Edward Livingston Trudeau was born in 1848, one year before Frédéric Chopin died of tuberculosis. Trudeau’s extended family eventually included Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, and Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame. In his time tuberculosis was killing up to 14% of persons who had ever lived and…

  • Charles-Michel Billard, an overlooked pediatric pioneer

    Stanford ShulmanChicago, Illinois Introduction During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries medicine transitioned into a more science-based discipline. This was primarily the result of gross pathology contributions of Giovanni Morgagni (1682-1772) of Padua and the later efforts of French physicians Jean Corvisart (1755-1821), F.X. Bichat (1771-1802), Rene Laennec (1781-1826), (Fig. 1) and Pierre Louis…

  • Portrait of Sir John Forbes as a young man

    Robin AgnewLiverpool, United Kingdom Introduction Sir John Forbes, the remarkable Scottish royal physician and medical journalist, died on 13 November 1861. He was not an innovator like the great French physician René Laȅnnec (1781–1826), who invented the monaural stethoscope in 1816. This consisted of a crude cylinder that could be applied directly to the chest…

  • René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec and the stethoscope

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States What constitutes a high-tech instrument? Obviously, in the field of medicine, one that has been developed to improve evaluation of a given condition and lead to a more specific diagnosis. In the early 19th century, there was little that could be considered high-tech in medicine in regard to instrumentation.…