You put your eye to a telescope and you put your eye to a microscope but you put your ear to a stethoscope.

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In 1816 a doctor by the name of René Laennec was examining a patient who seemed to have heart problems.

Just as your doctor probably does to you René tried tapping his hand on the patient’s back and listening to the resulting sounds to try and interpret meaning in their thumpyness.

Unfortunately the patient was overweight and he couldn’t make head or tale of the thumps.

His next step would normally have been to lay his ear against the patient’s chest to listen to the heart but in this case the patient was young and female and pressing his face to her ample bosom seemed a little inappropriate.

Then he had an idea.

“I happened to recollect a simple and well-known fact in acoustics, . . . 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 rolled a quire 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 my ear.”

Laennec had invented the stethoscope; now an unmistakable piece of medical paraphernalia.

He named the thing too. Stethos comes from Greek and means “chest” and scope is Greek for “to look at.”

In this case the “look at” is metaphorical. Where a telescope or a microscope actually involves seeing with your eyes a stethoscope involves seeing as in observing.

Laennec replaced his paper stethoscope with a wooden one and in 1819 published a paper on his technique. Tuberculosis was a big problem at the time and so doctors all over the place quickly started using this new piece of technology.

English picked up the word the very next year in 1820.

As I said tuberculosis was a big problem and it became a problem for Laennec as well. He died of it in 1826 at the age of 45.