Listening To The Body

The woman was rushed to Necker Hospital in Paris.

- Tracey E. Fern

Her face was pale and sweaty as she gasped for breath and clutched her chest. Young doctor René Laënnec raced to her bedside. Laënnec saw that this patient was desperately ill, perhaps ill enough to die. But what was the cause of her symptoms?

In 1816 there were no x-ray machines or ultrasounds—no tools at all to help Laënnec diagnose internal illnesses. Like all doctors of his day, Laënnec could only rely on what his patients told him about their symptoms and what he could observe with his own eyes. But this patient was too sick to be of much help. And of course Laënnec couldn’t see inside her body. He turned to the only other tools that he had available—his ears.

Doctors have been eavesdropping on the body’s sounds for more than two thousand years. The ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates pressed his ear to a patient’s chest and heard a “sound like fermenting vinegar” and a “creak like new leather.” These were just a few of the strange sounds that whispered from inside the human body. Other doctors heard clicks, coos, high-pitched whines, and a cacophony of other odd sounds. But the importance of these muffled noises remained a mystery for centuries.

Leopold Auenbrugger, a successful Austrian doctor who practiced medicine in the mid-1700s, was the first person to try to decode the sounds of the body. As a young boy Auenbrugger used to tag along with his father, who was an innkeeper. Auenbrugger watched as his father thumped on wine barrels to gauge how much liquid was left inside. An echo meant that the barrel was empty where his father tapped, while a muffled thwump meant that it was full.