It was French physician, René Laennec, who invented the means for our doctors to listen in the delicate internal clockwork of our body. The year was 1816. A woman suffering from symptoms related to heart disease consulted Leannec; but the physician had a hard time assessing her condition by conventional methods at the time. He felt very uncomfortable placing his ear on women’s chests. Checkup via percussion (a clinical examination done by tapping and taking note of the resulting sound) also proved ineffective due to the patient’s great degree of fatness—as Laennec put it in his classic treatise published in 1819 called “De l’Auscultation Médiate” (On Mediate Auscultation). He was then struck with inspiration on how to proceed and writes, “I rolled a quire of paper into a kind of cylinder and applied one end of it to the region of the heart and the other to my ear, and [...]
