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ing the chest altogether. This is how he wrote about his moment of discovery.
In 1816, I was consulted by a young woman laboring under general symptoms of diseased heart, and in whos case percussion and the application of the hand were of little avail on account of the great degree of fatness. The other method just mentioned [that is, putting the ear against the chest] being rendered inadmissable by the age and sex of the patient, I happened to recollect a simple and well-known fact in acoustics, and fancied it might be turned to some use on the present occasion. The fact I allude to is the great distinctness with which we hear the scratch of a pin at one end of a piece of wood, on applying our ear to the other. Immediately, on this suggestion, I roled a quire [or sheaf] of paper into a kind of cylinder and applied one end of it to the region of the heart and the other to my ear, and was not a little surprised and pleased, to find that I could thereby perceive the action of the heart in a manner much more clear and distinct than I had ever been able to do by the immediate application of the ear.
Laennec knew he was onto something, and he pursued his discovery. He tried listening to the chest with longer and shorter coils of paper, with hollowed-out pieces of wood, with solid wood, and glass, and various metal cylinders. He even tried listening through a friend's oboe. Finding wood worked best, he varied the type, trying ebony, cedar, malacca cane, and limewood. He made these instruments himself, on a lathe, and called them stethoscopes, from the Greek word stethos, "chest", and latin -scopium, referring to a means of observing. Finally he settled upon a foot-long cylinder of beechwood with a very narrow hole down the middle and scooped-out ends. He began manufacturing stethoscopes to be sold along with a book on how they were to be used.
All this work - his medical practice, his book writing, his stethoscope making, and his teaching as well - was done while Laennec suffered from his own case of tuberculosis. Shortly before the book was to be released, he was overcome with exhaustion, and just as he was about to acheive glory and fame, he decided he could no longer manage his work, and left Paris for the more restful countryside. At the time his symptoms were not clearly those of tuberculosis: he felt very, very weak, and dizzy, and so depressed he hardly wanted to live, but he had no sure sign of what was killing him.
Laennec continued to work strenuously whenever he could, and was forced to rest more than he desired, going for long stays in the country with his dogs Moustache and Kiss. Up until his death the cause of his illness was debated: even in his last months of life, when the doctors found an abdominal tumor, they wondered if that was the cause of all his symptoms. Laennec wrote in his last letter that he had a patient once who was considered as hopeless as he but who had survived. Despite his optimism, Laennec died the next Sunday, August 13, 1826, at the age of forty-five.
In fact, even if Laennec could have heard in his lungs unmistakable sounds of the damage caused by tuberculosis, he could not have cured himself. Even seventy years later, after the discovery of X rays allowed tuberculosis to be spotted much earlier, medicine still had little to offer in the way of treatment or cure. Laennec's life's work was merely one more step toward understanding the wiles of TB.
Luke-Sick
For the most part, people like Laennec who were sick with tuberculosis of the lungs felt a little sick for years, without being completely bedridden. For this reason, the disease was known as consumption or by the name the Greeks gave it, phthisis, which