Auscultations

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The act of listening to internal sounds of the body, typically for diagnostic purposes
2. a method employed by medical practitioners to assess conditions by auditory examination
3. the practice of using a stethoscope or similar instruments to detect abnormalities in bodily functions

Etymology: "Auscultations" is the plural of "auscultation", which comes from Latin "auscultatio", meaning "act of listening." The Latin noun belongs to the verb "auscultare", built from "auris" (ear) with the verb-forming element that gives many listening and attending words their shape. Its original sense was simply hearing or paying attention, and it reached English as a term of listening before any doctor applied it to the body. In medicine the word narrowed to a specific act: placing the ear, or later an instrument, against the chest or abdomen to hear the sounds the organs make. That is why "auscultation" describes a technique rather than a result, and why the plural refers to repeated or varied listening sessions, or to the different sounds a clinician examines in a patient. The stethoscope, which made this kind of listening possible, is itself a much later invention, so the modern practice sits on a classical word for hearing.