Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: stethoscope

  • Ode to my stethoscope

    Hilton KoppeLennox Head, Australia Poet’s note My Littman stethoscope has accompanied me on my journey in medicine across five decades into premature medical retirement. It was definitely more difficult to lay down my stethoscope than it had been for me to recommend medical retirement to many of my patients. This poem includes a liberal sprinkling…

  • Measure of the heart: Santorio Santorio and the pulsilogium

    Richard de GrijsDaniel VuillerminBeijing, China The heart is a musical organ. The irregularity of one’s inhalation and exhalation of air defies musicality, while the involuntary rumbling of moving gas in the intestines is embarrassingly analogous to the timbre of the tuba or trombone. Biomedical terminology and poetry are seemingly antithetical, but of the heart they…

  • 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…

  • Samuel A. Levine

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States In an era where the use of imaging and other technological testing frequently takes the place of bedside diagnosis, it is intriguing to recall the state of cardiovascular diagnosis when the clinician relied on his or her eyes, ears, and hands—with a little help from the stethoscope and electrocardiogram.…

  • 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.…

  • The history of the stethoscope

    MAS AhmedRomford, United Kingdom Victoria TurnockLondon, United Kingdom No other symbol is as entwined with the concept of being a doctor as the stethoscope. It is currently one of the most widely used tools that doctors and nurses use for diagnostic purposes. Before its invention auscultation was done by placing the ear and head against…

  • The stethoscope

    Fiona RobertsonScotland, United Kingdom One of the most iconic tools of the medical profession is the stethoscope. Here we see René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, a French physician, using his prototype monoaural stethoscope. It was a wooden cylinder one inch and a half in diameter, one foot long, and tapered at the end like a funnel. This embryonic…