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| 19th Century Stethoscope with bell-shaped end. |
My current work-in-progress is a novel which takes place
during the Civil War. The heroine is a nurse and the hero a doctor. It occurred
to me as the hero examined a patient, that I’d never seen pictures of a Civil
War surgeon using a stethoscope. So, off I went on a research quest to learn
when the stethoscope was invented.
Before the 1800’s if a physician needed to hear a patient’s
lungs, heart, or bowels he merely placed his ear against the patient’s body. I
can’t imagine how awkward this was for both the doctor and the patient. For
women, it meant having a doctor lay his head between their breasts and some ladies
refused to allow it. Although this method was somewhat effective, it was
difficult for the doctor to hear everything, or pinpoint from where an unusual
sound might have originated. The ear often
missed important clues, which could have helped them diagnose an illness.
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| Stethoscope-early wooded |
The word stethoscope comes from the Greek word, stethos
(chest) and the word, scopes (examination), and was invented in 1816 by Rene
Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781-1826), a physician at the Necker-Enfants
Malades Hospital in Paris. He’d been too embarrassed to press his ear against
the large bosom of a female patient and instead rolled up a sheaf of paper like
an ear-trumpet, in order to listen.
Excited by how loud and clear the sounds were, he created the
wooden aural stethoscope. Laënnec was skilled with a lathe and made his first
stethoscope from a turned piece of wood about
12 inches long with a 3/8 inch hollow bore. The doctor placed the smaller end
against his patient’s chest and listened through the larger funnel shaped, opposite
end.
In 1851 an Irish physician, Arthur Leared made the device
bi-aural.
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| Stethoscope-early bi-aural |
George Cammann wrote a major treatise on diagnosis by
auscultation, which was made possible by the bi-aural stethoscope. He refined
the stethoscope for commercialization in 1852.
I’m not certain how many Civil War surgeons had stethoscopes,
but I decided my brilliant doctor carried one in the pocket of his frock coat.
Sources:
Wilbur M.D., C. Keith, Civil War Medicine 1861-1865, The
Global Pequot Press, 1998
ADC, American Diagnostic Corporation, http://adctoday.com/learning-center/about-stethoscopes/history-stethoscope
The Virtual EMS Museum http://www.emsmuseum.org/virtual-museum/by_era/articles/398118-1816-The-Stethoscope
