LAENNEC, RENE THÉOPHILE HYACINTHE, the discoverer of mediate auscultation, was born at Quimper, in Lower Brittany, February 17, 1781. After going through the usual course at the chief school in the department of the Loire Inférieure, he began the study of medicine under the care of his paternal uncle, a distinguished physician at Nantes. In 1799 he acted for a short time as assistant surgeon in the military hospitals then established in that city. Removing to Paris in the following year, he attached himself to the clinical school in the great hospital of La Charité, at that time under the direction of the celebrated Corvisart. Among his fellow-students were Double and Bayle. Even thus early he began to make himself known by his occasional essays and pamphlets, and by his contributions to the Journal de Médecine. He graduated in 1804. In the same year he became editor of the Journal de Médecine, and continued to enrich its pages with many learned and original papers, chiefly on morbid pathology, till bad health compelled him to resign his office. His intention at this time was to have published a complete work of morbid anatomy, on which he had lectured publicly for some sessions at Paris. He did not live to carry out his plan; but portions of the work were published as separate articles in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales. Meanwhile his practice was keeping pace with his widening fame; and in 1816 he was appointed chief physician to the Hôpital Necker, the duties of which he undertook with his usual zeal and activity, and in which he was speedily rewarded for all his labours by his great discovery. For two years after the idea first dawned upon him he devoted himself with astonishing perseverance to perfecting the new system of diagnosis which he founded on it. By June in 1818 he had advanced so far as to read a memoir before the Academy of Sciences, containing the outline of his method, and in the September of the following year he published his remarkable work, under the title of De l'Auscultation Médiate, ou Traité du diagnostic des Maladies des Poumons et du Cœur, fondé principalement sur ce nouveau moyen d'exploration. The profession, especially the elder members of it, received the work with distrust; and but for the admirable descriptions of diseases contained in it, and giving it a value independent altogether of the system of diagnostics, his discovery might have fallen into temporary oblivion. Fortun-
Lafayette, however, Laennec had many zealous friends among his own students, who diffused a knowledge of the new method, not only in France, but in other countries of Europe.
Meanwhile, the labour involved both in observing and redacting the results of his observations had very nearly proved fatal to Laennec. He was physically very small and puny, and his intense application had now broken his health, both of mind and body. Relinquishing his valuable practice, and all his appointments, he retired to a country-house of his own near his birth-place. He was not long of recovering his health and spirits, but he was very unwilling to return to Paris. However, in the autumn of 1821 he did return, and besides renewing his duties at the Necker Hospital, became private physician to the Duchess of Berri, and professor of medicine in the College of France. When the college was reconstituted in the following year, he was appointed to the chair of clinical medicine. His health again began to give way, and the art which he had himself discovered warned him that he was falling a prey to pulmonary consumption. After seeing through the press the second edition of his great work, he again retired to his native town. At first he seemed to benefit by the change; but the disease had gone too far to be arrested, and he died August 13, 1826, in the forty-fifth year of his age.
Though it was as the inventor of the stethoscope that Laennec became known in his own day, and wished to be known by posterity, that invention is not his only or his greatest title to posthumous fame. Its invention was indirectly invaluable, as it led Laennec to make diseases of the chest his special study. These pathological inquiries of his yielded results more beneficial to mankind than any discovery in modern medicine, except vaccination. Diseases of the chest, which before Laennec's time had been very little understood, are now diagnosed by mediate or immediate auscultation with an accuracy as faultless as those which show themselves on the surface of the skin. Though he had a large and lucrative practice, Laennec does not seem to have been highly esteemed as a physician, and the therapeutic portions of his work are the least satisfactory. It was as a pathologist that he was distinguished above most of his contemporaries.
His great work has been translated into most of the European tongues. The English translation, by Dr John Forbes of Chichester, is preceded by a life of Laennec, compiled from two biographies by Kergaradec and Bayle.