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The french doctor, Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, is apparently the inventor of stethoscope. It is evidenced that in September 1816, he was examining a young female in whom he suspected a heart problem, but because of her stoutness, percussion was unhelpful. He thought of placing his ear directly on her chest to learn more about her heart, but decorum detected restraint. Rolling a notebook into a cylinder, he placed one end on her chest, the other to his ear, and was astonished to hear the beating of her heart.

Years later this tale was embellished by J.A.L. de Kergaradec, a former student of Laennec, who said that just before the consultation, Laennec had been crossing the courtyard of the Louvre, where he saw children playing an acoustic game with a log. When the ear was applied to one end of the log, a pin tapping at the other end could easily be heard.

The 'discovery' at the bedside of the well-endowed young patient was simply the rediscovery of a phenomenon: sound can be transmitted through a mediator. Interpretation of these transmitted sounds consumed Laennec's attention to the next two and a half years, the hospital patients were his focus. His new instrument allowed him to listen at a discreet distance that satisfied both modesty and hygiene.

Laennec's method was clinicopathological correlation. Initially, he buised his students with rolling notebooks into 'cylinders', as he called the first stethoscopes, sealed with gummed paper and string. Then he examined patients by percussion and 'mediate auscultation' (active listening through a mediator). The history and physical findings were carefully recorded. Laennec had to invent words to describe the sounds he heard: rales, crepitations, murmurs, pectorilquy, bronchophony, egophony. When a patient died, the autopsy was correlated with the clinical findings.

Laennec later named his cylinder 'stethoscope' (from the greek words for 'chest' and 'to explore'). In less than three years, he had established the anatomical significance of most of the normal and abnormal breath sounds still in use today. A few doctors preferred the pathology in his treatise to the 'gimmick' of the stethoscope, but their opposition soon melted away.

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