If you Google ‘Hugh Laurie’ and ‘stethoscope’, you will come up with a clutch of stories from February 2012 about how everybody’s favourite pill-popping misanthropic physician is “hanging up his stethoscope” after eight seasons on the hit show House. This underlines a more general truth: doctors don’t retire, they hang up their stethoscopes. Is there any profession so proverbially connected to one tool of their trade? Will people believe you are a doctor if you don’t wear one? These questions become topical because the stethoscope is reportedly becoming obsolete, nearly 200 years after it was invented. Is it anything to do with the finding that a third of US stethoscopes used in emergencies were contaminated with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria? No, but it probably didn’t help. Rather, according to this month’s edition of the World Heart Federation’s journal, Global Heart, the stethoscope is being replaced by more accurate and cheaper hand-held ultrasound devices. Upsetting news — at least for popular culture. What is every TV medic — from Kenneth Williams’s Dr Tinkle in Carry On Doctor to Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie — without a stethoscope? And if, as the Global Heart report suggests, the hand-held ultrasound devices that doctors of the future will be using look just like smartphones, how will we be able to tell the medics from the civilians in Casualty or Holby City? But there’s good news. If the stethoscope does become obsolete, it will also spell the end for one excrescence: a T-shirt targeted at medical students saying “Keep calm and carry a stethoscope.” Shy inventor The man who invented the stethoscope nearly 200 years ago was shy. French physician Rene Laennec dreaded placing his ear on the patient’s chest, especially when the patient was a woman. No offence to Laennec, but his patients probably didn’t care for it either, especially if he had cold and/or especially hairy ears. Shyness is the unsung mother of invention. It’s why Finns at Nokia invented texting (they couldn’t bear face-to-face rejection when proposing dates) and why in 1816 Dr Laennec came up with his auscultatory prosthesis (initially, a tube). Only later, as TV history tells us, did stethoscopes become more sophisticated. In the 60s, Richard Chamberlain’s Dr Kildare wore a stethoscope from a brand called Thumpy, whose earpieces clipped around the neck. By the time ER came along in the mid-90s, TV medics were wearing them with the tube around the neck like rubberised stoles. “The problem with that,” says a GP acquaintance, “is they look cool but keep falling off.” Only a doctor could use “cool” and “stethoscope” in the same sentence. How fortunate for Laennec that he died before he could see the sexist uses to which popular culture would put his invention. Oh Lord: if that’s what the stethoscope is going to be used for, it is just as well it is becoming obsolete. But is it? If we have learnt nothing else from Star Trek, it’s that, in the future, physicians — some of them aliens, admittedly — will be using stethoscopes. Who can forget that scene in which Phlox, the Denobulan chief medical officer aboard the Enterprise, treated the Klingon Klaang while wearing a (funky, space-aged) stethoscope? Not me. Rumours of the death of the stethoscope may be exaggerated. Source
