Edie Falco as Nurse Jackie in the US comedy-drama. Photograph: CBS/BBC
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 present Property.
This underlines a much more basic reality: medical doctors do not retire, they hang up their stethoscopes. Is there any occupation so proverbially connected to one device of their trade? Will individuals feel you are a medical professional if you will not dress in one particular?
These concerns become topical since the stethoscope is reportedly turning into obsolete, nearly 200 years after it was invented. Is it anything at all to do with the finding that a third of US stethoscopes utilized in emergencies have been contaminated with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria? No, but it possibly did not aid.
Rather, in accordance to this month’s edition of the Globe Heart Federation’s journal, International Heart, the stethoscope is currently being replaced by far more exact and less costly hand-held ultrasound gadgets.
Upsetting information – at least for well-liked culture. What is each and every Tv medic – from Kenneth Williams’s Dr Tinkle in Carry On Medical doctor to Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie – with out a stethoscope? And if, as the Global Heart report suggests, the handheld ultrasound units that doctors of the future will be utilizing look just like smartphones, how will we be in a position to inform the medics from the civilians in Casualty or Holby City?
But there is great news. If the stethoscope does become obsolete, it will also spell the finish for a single excrescence: a T-shirt targeted at medical college students saying “Hold calm and carry a stethoscope.”
The guy who invented the stethoscope almost 200 many years in the past was shy. French physician René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec dreaded placing his ear on the patient’s chest, specifically when the patient was a woman. No offence to Laënnec, but his patients probably did not care for it either, particularly if he had cold and/or especially hairy ears.
Shyness is the unsung mother of invention. It really is why Finns at Nokia invented texting (they could not bear encounter-to-face rejection when proposing dates) and why in 1816 Dr Laënnec came up with his auscultatory prosthesis (at first, a tube).
Only later, as Television history tells us, did stethoscopes grow to be much more sophisticated. In the 60s, Richard Chamberlain’s Dr Kildare wore a stethoscope from a brand called Thumpy, whose earpieces clipped close to the neck. By the time ER came along in the mid-90s, Tv medics have been wearing them with the tube close to the neck like rubberised stoles. “The problem with that,” says a GP acquaintance, “is they seem cool but hold falling off.” Only a doctor could use “amazing” and “stethoscope” in the identical sentence.
How lucky for Laënnec that he died just before he could see the sexist utilizes to which well-liked culture would put his invention. In the 1957 movie Doctor at Large, Dirk Bogarde’s Dr Simon Sparrow employs a stethoscope during an examination of a girl who’s been getting chest problems. “Big breaths, Eva.” “Yeth, and I am only 16.” Oh Lord: if which is what the stethoscope is going to be utilised for, it is just as properly it is becoming obsolete.
But is it? If we have realized absolutely nothing else from Star Trek, it truly is that, in the future, physicians – some of them aliens, admittedly – will be employing stethoscopes. Who can forget that scene in which Phlox, the Denobulan chief health care officer aboard the Enterprise, taken care of the Klingon Klaang whilst wearing a (funky, space-agey) stethoscope? Not me. Rumours of the death of the stethoscope could be exaggerated.
Consider a deep breath: the stethoscope is dying
