Although René Laennec (1781 - 1826) is known as the inventor of the stethoscope, it is known that doctors in Ancient Greece also performed the process of listening to the body with an instrument. Laennec, a French doctor, inspired the construction of the stethoscope when a patient came to visit him with a heart condition.
Embarrassed at the thought of putting his ear to the patient's navel, the doctor remembered that at that time the children were listening to the sound of a tree stump hitting one end of it from the other end. Thereupon, Laennec, who filled a cylinder tube with paper, realized that when he put the tube on the woman's chest, he could easily hear the patient's heartbeat from the open end of the tube.
René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec (17 February 1781 – 13 August 1826) was a French physician and musician. His skill at carving his own wooden flutes led him to invent the stethoscope in 1816, while working at the Hôpital Necker.
Starting from this idea, Laennec invented the first true stethoscope. This stethoscope was a wooden tube 22 centimeters long and 2.5 centimeters in diameter and was known as the Monaural (mono-sound) stethoscope because it had only one earpiece. Laennec devoted the next three years to improving his design. In his groundbreaking book published in 1819, he described that the stethoscope he invented could listen to the heartbeat and blood flow of living things, enabling the application of pathology to living things for the first time.
Binaural stethoscopes increased in popularity fairly rapidly. As early as 1829 a trumpet-shaped mahogany chestpiece was screwed into a joint from which two lead pipes led to the ears. The device, invented by medical student Nicholas P. Comins, was deemed flexible (despite the rigidity of the wooden and metallic parts), because unlike the earlier monaural stethoscopes, it had movable parts.
In 1829, Nicholas Comins, a Scottish physician, invented the first flexible stethoscope. In 1852, George P. Cammann, a doctor from New York, was the first to add two earphones to Laennec's design. In 1878, thanks to the microphone added to the stethoscope, sounds were made to be heard much more clearly.