CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE 



instrument already referred to, an instrument which its 

 originator thought hardly worth naming until various 

 barbarous appellations were applied to it by others, after 

 which Laennec decided to call it the stethoscope, a name 

 which it has ever since retained. 



In subsequent years the form of the stethoscope, as 

 usually employed, was modified, and its value augment- 

 ed by a binauricular attachment ; and in very recent 

 years a further improvement has been made through ap- 

 plication of the principle of the telephone ; but the es- 

 sentials of auscultation with the stethoscope were estab- 

 lished in much detail by Laennec, and the honor must 

 always be his of thus taking one of the longest single 

 steps by which practical medicine has in our century ac- 

 quired the right to be considered a rational science. 

 Laennec's efforts cost him his life, for he died in 1826 

 of a lung disease acquired in the course of his hospital 

 practice ; but even before this his fame was universal, 

 and the value of his method had been recognized all 

 over the world. Not long after, in 1828, yet another 

 French physician, Piorry, perfected the method of per- 

 cussion by introducing the custom of tapping, not the 

 chest directly, but the finger or a small metal or hard 

 rubber plate held against the chest mediate percussion, 

 in short. This perfected the methods of physical diag- 

 nosis of diseases of the chest in all essentials ; and from 

 that day till this percussion and auscultation have held 

 an unquestioned place in the regular armamentarium of 

 the physician. 



Coupled with the new method of physical diagnosis 

 in the effort to substitute knowledge for guess-work 

 came the studies of the experimental physiologists in 

 particular, Marshall Hall in England, and Francois Ma- 



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