Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Rene Laennec

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

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   Photo from the Adirondack Experience Museum. Circa 1895. 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…

  • Charles-Michel Billard, an overlooked pediatric pioneer

    Stanford Shulman Chicago, Illinois   Fig. 1 N Corvisart, F.X Bichat, and Rene Laennec are each shown on a commemorative postage stamp of France. From the author’s collection of medical history stamps. Introduction During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries medicine transitioned into a more science-based discipline. This was primarily the result of gross…

  • Portrait of Sir John Forbes as a young man

    Robin Agnew Liverpool, United Kingdom     Portrait of John Forbes MD as a physician in Chichester Courtesy of the Postgraduate Medical Centre St. Richard’s Hospital, Chichester, West Sussex 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…

  • 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.…