René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec was born on 17 February 1781 in Quimper and spent much of his youth in Nantes, where his uncle Guillaume was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine. He was considerably influenced by his uncle and went to study medicine in Paris where he qualified in 1804. Among his teachers were Corvisart and Bayle who stimulated his interest in the clinical diagnosis of diseases of t...

T HERE are no reliable acoustical data to aid physicians in their selection or use of a stethoscope. Yet, the sole medical utility of any stethoscope is derived from its acoustical performance. It is the purpose of this paper to provide clinicians with objective acoustical performance data on intact and current stethoscopes. Frederick and Dodge' first recognized that the stethoscope was deservi...

tant Abt Associates Inc, showed that 90% do not have a consistent water supply and 50% do not have electrical generators. “We never have a day without the electricity cutting off for 12 hours or longer, and half of these centers have no generator,” said Alwan. The same survey showed that 95% of those centers do not have gynecologic tables or electrocardiogram machines. “When we say there’s a sc...

In many developing countries (e.g., Ivory Coast, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria), half the population lives in rural locations, where accessibility to school materials, medical supplies, mosquito nets, and clothing is restricted [2]. Distribution to these locations typically requires direct road transport, which is time consuming and requires bulk volume to be cost effective. In response to these limi...

This paper presents the design and evaluation of the hardware circuit for electronic stethoscopes with heart sound cancellation capabilities using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The adaptive line enhancer (ALE) was adopted as the filtering methodology to reduce heart sound attributes from the breath sounds obtained via the electronic stethoscope pickup. FPGAs were utilized to implement...

This exploratory study determined the epidemiological characteristics of Staphylococcus epidermidis from near touch sites and blood cultures in one Intensive Care Unit (ICU) between July and October 2009 in a large teaching hospital in Brazil. Five different touch sites around the environment of two different patients were sampled over four days and 24 blood cultures from 24 patients were obtai...

Stethoscope diaphragms are frequently colonized by bacteria. This cross-sectional study described the frequency and factors associated with reporting ever cleaning stethoscopes among 408 medical students and doctors at a medical college and 2 teaching hospitals in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. A minority of the respondents (37.7%) reported having ever cleaned their stethoscope. Following normal clinica...

In 19th century, the anatomo-clinical school of Paris linked clinical signs with anatomical lesions establishing clinical medicine. One of the most enlightened promoters of this method was the French physician René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, known as the inventor of stethoscope. In our article, we reveal his work on pulmonary melanoma.

BACKGROUND To determine whether the use of an electronic, sensor based stethoscope affects the cardiac auscultation skills of undergraduate medical students. METHODS Forty eight third year medical students were randomized to use either an electronic stethoscope, or a conventional acoustic stethoscope during clinical auscultation training. After a training period of four months, cardiac auscul...

No, I am not a patient. Yes, I can hear you. Yes, I can still use my stethoscope. Yes, I can speak English. Yes, I can speak Arabic you’re welcome. I am honoured that you were hoping I would call your name in the waiting room. How can I help? We are the same. Yes, I have changed this hijab and covered it with a surgical balaclava, I am sterile. No, I do not want to wear this sterile green drape...