Scandalous to place head over woman’s chest: Untold story behind making of stethoscope

The stethoscope has been the face of healthcare for over 200 years. It's a simple yet powerful device to hear internal sounds of the body. 

It is an indispensable medical tool used to assess and diagnose patients. However, we know little about how it was created.

For those guessing would think of a scientist thinking of amplifying the sounds but there was something more powerful than creative forces which led to the formation of the stethoscope.

Diagnosis before stethoscope

Before the stethoscope, the usual method to hear heart sounds was to place the head over the patient’s head and mechanically listen to them. This method had some drawbacks, it was ineffective in people with larger breasts or those who were obese. Moreover, the practice became unhygienic in hospital settings.

A French doctor got shy

In 1816, a French physician Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was treating a girl having heart disease. The patient was overweight and the physician couldn’t hear the heart sounds. He hesitated to place his head over her chest all over again. The incident left an uncomfortable impression on the doctor who found the practice inappropriate and immodest towards a young lady.

Creating distance between the doctor and patient

Laennec remembered the auditory phenomenon of making scratching sound on one end of a cylindrical tube to listen the sound of it on the other end. He replicated the same for a physician to hear sounds at a distance and without having to touch the patient. To his surprise, he found the sounds got amplified and eventually started using it for hearing sounds from lungs as well. He called it ‘stethoscope’ where 'stetho' means chest and scope means viewing, implfying a view into the chest.

Blocking the external noise

In 1851, NB Marsh thought the same instrument could have two ear pieces to block off the external noise. This led to the formation of a binaural stethoscope.

Dr David Littman later improved it to a model which closely resembled the present day stethoscope.

Record for later use

In 1999, Dr Richard J Deslauriers invented a groundbreaking stethoscope which could record sounds from heart and lungs, store them in the device for later use.

Moving towards AI

Researchers today are developing algorithms that could analyse chest sounds taken from digital stethoscopes. This could be used as a low-cost screening tool for heart diseases.