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Casaubon winced perceptibly, but bowed. "I believe that you are suffering from what is called fatty degeneration of the heart, a disease which was first divined and explored by Laennec, the man who gave us the stethoscope, not so very many years ago. A good deal of experience a more lengthened observation is wanting on the subject.
But, be this as it may, to Laennec belongs the great credit of having laid a substantial foundation for the physical diagnosis of the present time, and, more than for laying a foundation, for constructing a fairly complete edifice.
In the year 1816 a French physician, Réné Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec, achieved undying fame by publishing to the world an account of his labors in the application of mediate auscultation and of percussion to the diagnosis of the diseases of the chest.
You may still win a great fame like the Louis and Laennec I have heard you speak of, and we shall all be proud of you," she ended, with a smile. "That might do if I had my old trust in myself," said Lydgate, mournfully. "Nothing galls me more than the notion of turning round and running away before this slander, leaving it unchecked behind me.
Laennec, Merat, and many other writers have mentioned death caused by the entrance of vomited materials into the air-passages. Parrot has observed a child who died by the penetration of chyme into the air-passages. The bronchial mucous and underlying membrane were already in a process of digestion. Behrend, Piegu, and others cite analogous instances.
In other words, they were dismissed as curious nonentities, of no real significance to the running of the body. Laennec, the French founder of the Art of Diagnosis in Medicine, once said that nothing about a science is more interesting than the progress of that science itself. He might have added that nothing either was more interesting than the contradictions in that progress.
In subsequent years the form of the stethoscope, as usually employed, was modified and its value augmented by a binauricular attachment, and in very recent years a further improvement has been made through application of the principle of the telephone; but the essentials of auscultation with the stethoscope were established in much detail by Laennec, and the honor must always be his of thus taking one of the longest single steps by which practical medicine has in our century acquired the right to be considered a rational science.
Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would practise freely but for public opinion. Chloroform he regards as a dangerous innovation, and he always clicks with his tongue when it is mentioned. He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer to the stethoscope as "a new-fangled French toy."
The possibility of associating the varying chest sounds with diseased conditions of the organs within appealed to the fertile mind of Laennec as opening new vistas in therapeutics, which he determined to enter to the fullest extent practicable.
A Breton by birth, he had a hard, up-hill struggle as a young man a struggle of which we have only recently been made aware by the publication of a charming book by Professor Rouxeau of Nantes "Laennec avant 1806." Influenced by Corvisart, he began to combine the accurate study of cases in the wards with anatomical investigations in the dead-house.
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