Dr Laennec's importance to modern medicine was guaranteed by his invention of the very first stethoscope in 1816. Here are five things you (probably) didn't know about him : 1.

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 ...

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 ...

Laennec named his invention the stethoscope, from the Greek words for "chest" and "to view," because it opened a new window into what was happening in the heart and lungs. A modest experiment ...

Laennec soon discarded the rolled up notebook and fashioned a new wooden, cylinder-shaped stethoscope. The two-eared rubber-tubing version now standard in hospitals around the world came later, in ...

On the 236th birth anniversary of French physician René Laennec, considered the inventor of the stethoscope with a special doodle commemorating him on René Laennec stumbled upon the design of ...

Pinkerton JHM. Kergaradec, friend of Laennec and pioneer of fetal auscultation. Proc R Sec Med. 1969;62:477-483. Roguin A. Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826): The man behind the stethoscope.

Stethoscopes have been used by doctors since their invention in 1816 by French physician Rene Laennec (1781-1826), who on one momentous day in his office rolled a sheaf of paper into a tube and ...

Modern-day stethoscopes bear little resemblance to the first stethoscope, invented in the early 1800s by Frenchman Rene Laennec, but they work essentially the same way.

Modern-day stethoscopes bear little resemblance to the first stethoscope, invented in the early 1800s by Frenchman Rene Laennec, but they work essentially the same way.

René Laennec, the French physician who invented the stethoscope in 1816, used the stethoscope as an indirect way to "look" into the chest. "Now that we have ultrasound, we have a real ...