Modesty led to creation of stethoscope

Derived from the Greek, stetho, meaning chest, and scopopos, meaning examination, the stethoscope was born of modesty.

In 1816, Dr. René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec, by one description a “diminutive, asthmatic and very shy” French physician and tuberculosis specialist, was asked to examine a woman with heart problems.

Reluctant to put his ear to her chest because of her age, sex and degree of “plumpness,” he remembered an acoustic phenomenon: “If you place your ear against one end of a wood beam the scratch of a pin at the other end is distinctly audible,” he wrote in his seminal paper, De l’Auscultation Médiate.

He tightly rolled 24 sheets of paper, put one end on the woman’s chest, the other to his ear, and was “surprised and elated to be able to hear the beating of her heart with far greater clearness than I ever had with direct application of the ear.”

The stethoscope was adopted across Europe before spreading to the U.S. Laënnec died of tuberculosis in 1826, at the age of 45.