René Laennec
René Laennec was a well-known physician and a professor of medicine who invented the stethoscope.
René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was a French physician whose invention of the stethoscope revolutionised the physical examination of the chest and gave clinical medicine one of its most enduring instruments. Born on 17 February 1781 in Quimper, Brittany, he died on 13 August 1826 at his estate in Kerlouanec, Brittany, of tuberculosis at the age of 45.
Raised by an uncle who was a physician, he studied medicine in Nantes and then in Paris under Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, the personal doctor of Napoleon. By the early 1810s he was working at the Necker Hospital in Paris, where in 1816 he rolled a quire of paper into a tube to listen to the heart of a young woman whose body habitus made direct ear-to-chest auscultation impractical.
He refined the device into a wooden cylinder he called the stéthoscope, from the Greek stēthos for chest and skopein for examine. His 1819 treatise De l'auscultation médiate systematically correlated lung and heart sounds with autopsy findings, establishing terms such as rales, rhonchi, and egophony that physicians still use.
Appointed to the Collège de France in 1822 and to the Charité Hospital in 1823, he taught a generation of French and foreign students. He almost certainly contracted the tuberculosis that killed him from his patients and from his own dissections.
The name René is the French form of Renatus, from the Latin meaning "reborn", a name long popular in Catholic Europe for its baptismal connotations. He carried it through a short career that lent medicine one of its most familiar listening tools.