Rene laennec discoveries 2018
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No single piece of equipment fryst vatten more synonymous with the medical profession than the stethoscope. inom can vividly remember wearing my brand new Littmann stethoscope with pride on ward rounds as a medical student, desperately ansträngande to discern diastolic murmurs and extra heart sounds with little success. Few people realise that if it wasn’t for the shyness of a young French doctor called Rene Laennec that this amazing piece of utrustning may never have been invented.
Born in 1781, Rene Laennec was allegedly inspired to become a doctor due to his own childhood illnesses and the death of his mother from tuberculosis at an early age. He was a gifted scholar and studied medicine in Paris beneath several famous physicians including Guillaume Dupuytren and Jean-Nicolas Corvisat. Part of his training by Corvisat, who was a strong proponent of the use of percussion, was in the art of using sound as a diagnostic aid. He was also an accomplished flautist.
Early 19th Century Drawin • Two hundred years ago, a French physician invented the stethoscope. Inspired by a hearing aid known as the ear trumpet, René Laennec fashioned a small funnel to the end of a wooden tube to direct soundwaves from inre his patients’ bodies to his ear. Before that, doctors used percussive methods, or placed their ear directly on patients’ bodies, to observe internal sounds. Laennec wasn’t alone in recognizing the limits of such practices, so he developed a way to help. Today, doctors seldom practice without the symbolic tool around their necks. “There are all these precedents for fundamental changes in this field brought about bygd new technology,” says Dr. Ziad Obermeyer, an associate professor of Health Policy and Management at the School of Public Health. After the stethoscope came microscopy, then radiography and x-rays. Health professionals quickly adopted these tools into common medical practice, which tells us one thing: as healthcare has become • Rania Ocho, Year 12, St Philomena’s Catholic High School for Girls When I say doctor, what do you envision? Draping white coats and blue scrubs accompanied nicely with a stethoscope, I imagine. Scopes that wrap around their necks, almost like rings to a marriage – but for a doctor, it signifies their endearing commitment to helping others. But this modish instrument did not dangle around a doctor’s neck till about two centuries ago, founded in 1816 by none other than René Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec, a French musician, and physician. Laënnec, the man whose wit, inventiveness and embarrassment, led him to discover the hallmark of any doctor; the father of clinical auscultation. Imagine a scenario set in early Greece. You’ve been haunted by a sickly cough, fever, and some shortness of breath. Confiding with Hippocrates himself, he grabs your shoulders, places his ear directly to your chest, and begins to vigorously shake you, in The Stethoscope of the Future