Rene Laennec: Google celebrates the 235th birthday of stethoscope inventor

The creative team at Google has come up with yet another doodle that celebrates the birthday of the inventor of the stethoscope, Rene Laennec. The doodle shows off the first version of the original stethoscope which was made out of wood and brass and simply looked like a wooden tube. The doodle features Laennec standing on left while a modern day doctor using the now common binaural stethoscope on the right. Born on 17 February, 1781 in France, the Laennec was a religious man and the inventor and founder of many other medical contributions apart from the stethoscope. Laennec was said to have come up with the idea when a female client visited him showing general symptoms of a diseased heart. During the time, the only way to hear a patient’s heartbeat was to place one’s ear on the patient’s chest. Considering that Rene Laennec was a gentleman (and a good Christian) he was a bit shy to go through the standard procedure, even more so because his journal mentions that she was overweight, and placing his ear would make little sense. What he did to overcome that difficulty was to roll up a sheet of paper and place it on the area near the patient’s heart. Laennec was said to have been inspired by children who  playing with long, hollow sticks that transmitted and amplified the scratch sound that was pulled off by scratching a pin on the other end. One also needs to consider that Rene Laennec was a flautist, which could have also been the core idea behind his discovery. The wood and brass invention was named the stethoscope with stethos coming from the word chest, and skopos referring to examination. Still the final binaural stethoscope that doctors use everywhere today came only in 1851 after Arthur Leared perfected the design.