1831: a retrospect : being the President's address to the Harveian Society, January 19, 1893 / by W.B. Cheadle.

  • Walter Butler Cheadle
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: 1831: a retrospect : being the President's address to the Harveian Society, January 19, 1893 / by W.B. Cheadle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    which more than any other, perhaps, have helped to an accurate knowledge of diseased conditions, and have effected the greatest revolution in medicine. The first was the discovery of auscultation by Laennec in 1818. The idea of ascertaining the condition of the lungs and heart—the faults in the machinery of respiration and circulation—by listen- ing to the chest was almost entirely new. Hitherto auscultation had been limited to vague and trifling notions of sounds heard in certain diseases. It is remarkable that, of the very few references to be found of sounds heard in the chest before the time of Laennec, no less than three of them are met with in Hippocrates, who lived more than two thou- sand years ago, and who appears to have recognised the creaking of pleuritic adhesions and the splash of succussion.' It is true tha.t the way had been prepared for Laennec, and attention drawn to the physical ex- amination of the chest, by the jsublication by Aren- brugger of Vienna of his ' Novum Inventum,' describing the method of direct percussion, by tapping the parietes with the tips of the fingers ; the mediate percussion with the intervention of a plexi- meter, now in use, was an improvement introduced ' Dr. Gee, Auscvltaiion and remission, 1S77, p. 99, foot-note.
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