The stethoscope.: How the presentation of a medical innovation influenced its success

• Autores: Maria Winter
• Localización: The Circulation of Science and Technology: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science. Barcelona, 18-20 November 2010 / coord. por Antoni M. Roca Rosell, 2012, ISBN 978-84-9965-108-8, págs. 1002-1009
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Laennec’s De l’Auscultation Médiate (1819) has been criticized even by its translator, John Forbes, for being “written in a diffuse and verbose style by no means commendable in a work of science”. The modern reader would wholeheartedly agree, especially since the book also seems to indiscriminately mingle case reports, pathogeneses, diagnostics, post-mortem analyses, physiology and numerous other elements including anecdotes from the author’s life. Only a very small proportion is dedicated to the stethoscope and its use.

    It is interesting to observe that in fact Laennec’s contemporaries perceived the work above all as a treatise on anatomical pathology and not so much as a handbook for a new means of diagnosis.

    For his first English translation, Forbes consequently rearranged and considerably shortened the book, “restoring” it to “what I humbly conceive it ought always to have been”.

    The most common criticism was, however, the sheer length of the work; two volumes of 470 and 472 pages.

    Soon concise versions, even tiny “pocket versions” and overviews in tabular form, came out. Their great variety seems to suggest a considerable demand.

    But not all objections were based on presentation. The new method of diagnosis was criticized “because its whole hue and character is foreign, and opposed to all our habits and associations.” It was considered too complicated to learn, too mechanical and against the old art of Hippocratical medicine. But this all didn’t stop the stethoscope from becoming inevitable within only a few decades.

    On the basis of books, press and journal reports, the paper seeks to examine how far the way of presentation chosen by Laennec served as inhibitor or promoter to the international success of his invention, with special focus on France, Britain and Germany.