Stethoscope Invented

1816

In a Paris hospital, Rene Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube to listen to a stout woman's heart. The tube worked. He refined it into a wooden cylinder and published his findings. Doctors, for the first time, could hear inside a living body without touching it. Laennec's instrument transformed diagnosis and remains, two centuries later, the most recognizable symbol of the medical profession.