The History of the Stethoscope

By Kristy McCaffrey

The method of listening to the sounds of the heart, lungs, and other organs is called auscultation. In 1816, a French doctor named René Laennec was examining a 40-year-old woman, and he was embarrassed to place his ear to her chest to perform an auscultation. Remembering a trick he’d learned as a child, he rolled up twenty-four sheets of paper and used it to listen to the woman’s heart.

René Laennec

The design was soon improved using wooden funnels. Laennec preferred to call his instrument Le Cylindre, but later changed it to the stethoscope, deriving from the Greek word stethos (meaning chest) and scope, a French word derived from the Latin scopium (meaning to view). It allowed him to extensively study chest diseases and especially tuberculosis, from which he eventually died.

One of Laennec's original stethoscopes

Laennec was the first to describe the auscultatory signs in medical use today, such as bruit (a whooshing sound caused by turbulent blood flow in an artery), rales (clicking, bubbling, or rattling sounds in the lungs), bronchophony (a patient’s voice sounds louder and clearer than normal when heard through a stethoscope), and egophony (an abnormal lung sound that occurs when a patient says the letter “E” but the sound heard through the stethoscope is changed to a nasal, bleating “A” sound).

The wooden model was used for twenty-five years until an Irish physician named Arthur Leared created a model with two earpieces (called binaural) placed at the end of stiff metal tubes. It would be another one hundred years before the next improvement: the addition of two bells (the part the doctor presses against the patient’s skin) to listen to different parts of the body at the same time, such as the heart and the lungs. By the 1940’s this was the most popular type of stethoscope. 

The current design was created in 1961—a lighter model that can listen to lower or higher pitched noises by adjusting the pressure of the bell against a patient’s body.

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Oklahoma Territory
November 1899 

Dr. Anna Ryan has been spurned by the Dallas medical community for the simple reason of being a woman. Wanting more than a rural practice alongside her mother, also a doctor, Anna accepts an invitation from a mentor to join a private hospital for disabled children in Oklahoma City. But when she falls in with a band of women attempting to liberate a town of innocents, she’ll need more than her medical training to survive.

Malcolm Hardy has skirted the line between lawlessness and justice since escaping the mean streak of his father and his no-good half-siblings a decade ago. In Oklahoma Territory he created enough distance from his family name to find a quiet purpose to his days. But then Anna Ryan walks back into his life, and his hard-won peace is in jeopardy.

The last time Malcolm saw Anna, she had been a determined girl he couldn’t help but admire. Now she was a compelling woman who needed his help to find The Swan, a mysterious figure with a questionable reputation. But one thing was clear—Anna’s life path was on a trajectory for the remarkable while Malcolm’s was not. Surrendering to temptation would only end in heartbreak.

Anna is the eldest daughter of Logan and Claire from THE DOVE. 

The Wings of the West Series Reading Order
Book One: The Wren
Book Two: The Dove
Book Three: The Sparrow
Book Four: The Blackbird
Book Five: The Bluebird
Book Six: The Songbird (Novella)
Book Seven: Echo of the Plains (Short Story)
Book Eight: The Starling
Book Nine: The Canary
Book Ten: The Nighthawk
Book Eleven: The Swan (Coming Soon)

 

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