United States or Hong Kong ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In 1819 Laennec published the results of his labors in a work called Traite d'Auscultation Mediate, a work which forms one of the landmarks of scientific medicine.
That battlefield on which he fell is one which demands courage and claims many victims. He has advanced the science of medicine. No one at his age has done so much so well." E. Boinet: Les doctrines medicules, leur evolution, Paris, 1907, pp. 85-86. It was a pupil of Corvisart, Rene Theophile Laennec, who laid the foundation of modern clinical medicine. The story of his life is well known.
"Yet I suppose no one has failed to notice several small coincidences in their lives, of what might almost be called a providential kind. "I read in a book about Laennec's method, without the vaguest idea of who Laennec was, or what his method was.
Pare, Morgagni, Portal, Hewson Smith, Dupuytren, Laennec, and others mention this injury. Gosselin reports two cases terminating in recovery. Ashurst reports having seen three cases, all of which terminated fatally before the fifth day; he has collected the histories of 39 cases, of which 12 recovered.
Acting on the hint thus received, Laennec substituted a hollow cylinder of wood for the paper, and found himself provided with an instrument through which not merely heart sounds but murmurs of the lungs in respiration could be heard with almost startling distinctness.
There are plenty of torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the stride of man, and not of woman. Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart. So says the great medical authority, Laennec. Incurable cases of this kind used to find their hospitals in convents. We have the disease in New England, but not the hospitals. I don't like to think of it.
By mediate auscultation is meant, of course, the interrogation of the chest with the aid of the little instrument already referred to, an instrument which its originator thought hardly worth naming until various barbarous appellations were applied to it by others, after which Laennec decided to call it the stethoscope, a name which it has ever since retained.
Then, in 1815, another Paris physician, Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec, discovered, almost by accident, that the sound of the heart-beat could be heard surprisingly through a cylinder of paper held to the ear and against the patient's chest.
We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency with which diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the terrible emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. Laennec tells the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director, where all the nuns were subjected to the severest penances and schooled in the most painful doctrines.
You have only to read Cullen's description of inflammation of the lungs or of the bowels, and compare it with such as you may find in Laennec or Watson, to see the immense gain which diagnosis and prognosis have derived from general anatomy.
Word Of The Day