Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on . The stethoscope is considered to be the first diagnostic tool introduced into modern medicine. From the Greek ...

Two centuries after its invention, the stethoscope — the very symbol of the medical profession — is facing an uncertain prognosis. It is threatened by hand-held devices that are also pressed against ...

In 1816, Dr. Rene Laennec found himself in an uncomfortable predicament when he needed to listen to a patients heartbeat. Thinking on his feet, he resorted to a makeshift solution: a paper tube. This ...

To hear a patient's heart, doctors used to just put an ear up to a patient's chest and listen. Then, in 1816, things changed. Lore has it that 35-year-old Paris physician Rene Laennec was caring for a ...

A Google Images search for “doctor” reveals essentially the same picture: a doctor wearing a crisply ironed white coat with a stethoscope draped, scarf-like, around the neck. The only difference ...

In 1816, French physician Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec had a young woman on his exam table, and no idea what to do with her. She’d come in complaining of chest pains, and their conversation and ...

Is high-tech imaging replacing rubber tubing and ear buds? Doctors used to just put an ear up to a patient’s chest and listen. Then, in 1816, things changed. Thirty-five-year-old Paris physician Rene ...

Credit a modest 19th-century Parisian doctor for having invented the stethoscope. In 1816, while examining a female patient with heart disease, Dr. René Laennec faced a conundrum: He needed to hear ...

For all the advances in medical diagnostics made over the last two centuries of modern medicine, from the ability to peer deep inside the body with the help of superconducting magnets to harnessing ...

Two centuries after its invention, the stethoscope — the very symbol of the medical profession — is facing an uncertain prognosis. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free ...