Читать книгу The Greatest Of Sins - Christine Merrill - Страница 5

To give my hero Sam Hastings a chance to use a stethoscope I had to set this story after the Napoleonic war and hope that he might have picked one up from a French ship while serving in the navy. In England, such a thing would have been unheard of, and Sam’s would have been quite a novelty. While the one I give to Sam is a wooden tube, the very first one was nothing more than a rolled up piece of paper.

Rene Theophile Laënnec was the French physician who discovered that it was possible to listen to the heart through a tube. Before him, doctors would either place their ears directly on the patient’s chest or pound their backs with a hammer and listen to the resonance. In 1816 poor Rene was called to treat a buxom young lady with a heart condition. He was too embarrassed to place his ear directly on her chest, and improvised a paper tube to listen through.

And thus one of the most commonplace pieces of medical equipment was invented.