Description
Doctors used a simple tool like this to listen to the pulses and gurgles inside a patient’s body. The modern stethoscope with two earpieces followed later.

The wider end is placed against the patient’s body. The user listens in at the narrower end. It works by concentrating sound waves, funnelling them down the tapering shape.

The first stethoscope was a simple tube of paper, used by René Laennec (1781-1826) to avoid pressing his ear to the chest of a female patient. Laennec was a musician and made musical instruments. He may have been inspired by his flute to develop the first wooden stethoscope.
22/07/2024
Created by: Hannah Price on 22/07/2024

Description
This type of stethoscope was used before the more familiar binaural stethoscopes came into use. The monaural stethoscope consisted of a simple, singular tube which the physician would hold against the patient's chest and listen through at the other end.

The first monaural stethoscope is the simple wooden cylinder invented by Laennec in 1819. He was working in the Paris hospitals where increasingly patients were being physically examined prior to diagnosis. Laennec realised that the use of an ear-trumpet, originally made of paper, amplified sounds in the chest to a remarkable extent. His work was first published in English in 1825 and Lydgate, a disciple of Paris medicine ‘not only used his stethoscope (which had not quite become a matter of course in practice at that time), but sat quietly by his patient and watched him’, another new idea in medical practice in the 1830s.

Many of these stethoscopes were made of wood, ivory, brass or silver and were often modified by the physicians themselves.

Very long stethoscopes were used in poorhouses during the Victorian era so that the physician could keep as far away from their patient as possible!
25/08/2006
Created by: Updated by Ruth Horry on 25/08/2006