HESI A2 Practice Test 15

A Tube of Paper

¹In 1816, a young French physician named René Laennec faced an awkward problem. A patient with signs of heart trouble came to see him, and the usual method of listening to the chest, pressing an ear directly against the patient's body, seemed improper. Laennec rolled a few sheets of paper into a tight tube, placed one end on the patient's chest and put his ear to the other. To his surprise, the heartbeat sounded clearer than it ever had through his bare ear.

²Laennec soon replaced the paper with a hollow wooden cylinder nearly a foot long. He spent the next several years listening to the chests of hundreds of patients and comparing what he heard with what was found at autopsy after some of them died. In this way he learned to connect particular sounds with particular diseases of the heart and lungs. He named his instrument the stethoscope, from Greek words meaning "chest" and "to look at," and he published a detailed guide to its use in 1819.

³Not every doctor welcomed the device. Some considered it a clumsy gadget that put distance between physician and patient, and others doubted that the sounds meant anything at all. Over time, however, the instrument proved its worth. Later inventors added flexible tubing and two earpieces, and the design gradually took the familiar form seen around the necks of nurses and doctors today.

⁴The stethoscope's lasting importance lies less in its hardware than in the habit of mind it encouraged. Laennec showed that careful observation of the living body, checked against physical evidence, could reveal disease that the patient could not describe. That approach remains at the core of the physical examination two centuries later.