Abstract
The practice of mediate auscultation—listening to the body through a stethoscope—was at the center of new articulations of medical thought and practice in the 19th century. During that period, the stethoscope became the hallmark of medical modernity. This article offers a detailed examination of the work of RTH Laennec and other important writings on the stethoscope in order to argue for the centrality of a distinctive orientation toward listening in modern medicine. The development of mediate auscultation applied medical and scientific reason to listening, just as a particular practice of hearing the body became integral to everyday functioning of medicine. Mediate auscultation was thus an artifact of a new approach to reason and the senses, one based in a scientific mindset and a logic of mediation.
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Sterne, J. Mediate Auscultation, the Stethoscope, and the “Autopsy of the Living”: Medicine's Acoustic Culture. Journal of Medical Humanities 22, 115–136 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009067628620
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009067628620