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 ...

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 ...

“It must be confessed that there is something even ludicrous in the picture of a grave physician formally listening through a long tube applied to the patient’s thorax, as if the disease within were a ...

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 ...

In a monthly column for PBS NewsHour, Dr. Howard Markel revisits moments that changed the course of modern medicine, like the invention of the stethoscope. Photo By BSIP/UIG via Getty Images. Long ...

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 ...

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 ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. & STAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--3M and Zargis Medical Corp., today announced that the 3M™ Littmann® Electronic Stethoscope Model 3200 (Littmann Model 3200) and the Zargis ...

No implement better visually identifies a physician than does the stethoscope, the acoustic medical device that enables medical personnel to listen to the internal sounds produced by the body.