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Birthday of René Laënnec search engine Google celebrates the stethoscope inventor
Google celebrates the physician René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec. Today the Frenchman would have been 235 years old. He is considered the inventor of the stethoscope. The device, which was an indispensable part of modern medicine, was initially just a simple wooden tube.
The inventor of the stethoscope
Today René Laënnec, the inventor of the stethoscope, is honored by Google with a so-called Doodle. The French doctor would have been 235 years old on Wednesday. Laënnec was born on 17 February 1781 in Quimper in Brittany. With his invention, he made an important medical breakthrough in the early 19th century. Initially it was just a wooden tube, today it is a standard tool for doctors around the world: the stethoscope.
The stethoscope is one of the most widely used diagnostic instruments today. (Image: Gina Sanders / fotolia.com) Idea came in an investigation
It is said that he came to his invention because he did not want to place his ear on a patient's chest for listening. Instead, he used a paper tube as a tube, familiar from playing children. The doctor clearly stated that he was not so bad, but heard even better. Thus, the original stethoscope was born and laid the foundation for the revolution for the diagnosis of heart and lung diseases.
First a simple wooden tube
The first devices in the form of a wooden ear-tube were reminiscent of today's variants, which hang the doctors around the shoulders. After this discovery, the Frenchman continued to work on the possibilities of diagnosing sounds and published important papers on the subject. Laënnec was 45 years old, he died in 1826. This Wednesday, the inventor of stethoscope was 235 years old.
Stethoscopes in medical everyday life
In everyday clinical practice, the stethoscope is used to monitor (discoagulate) various organs such as the heart, lungs, intestines, arteries and also to measure blood pressure. These include, for example, heart sounds, heart sounds, breathing sounds and secondary breath sounds such as rattles, intestinal noises, vascular noises (carotid artery) or even childlike heart sounds in pregnant women.
From the joke article to the gilded version
Partly nowadays even medical laymen use stethoscopes. Health experts usually advise against self-diagnosis. There are a variety of products on the market: from cheap goods, which are often only used as gimmick, to low-priced devices for medical students, to gilded variants for vain chief physicians. A study by the University of Alabama, published in the journal Cardinal Health, showed that the acoustic properties of expensive and inexpensive stethoscopes are as good as no statistical differences ("computerized signal processing methods"). differ. (Ad)