Stethoscopy

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The act or practice of examining internal body sounds using a specialized listening instrument; the procedure of auscultation to assess heart, lung, and other bodily functions; the technique involving a device placed on the body to detect physiological sounds
2. The method of medical assessment involving listening to internal acoustic signals through a tube-shaped device; the use of an acoustic instrument to diagnose heartbeats, breath, and other bodily noises; the clinical process of evaluating organ function by sound detection
3. The clinical operation of monitoring bodily sounds with an instrument designed for auditory examination; the diagnostic practice of interpreting heart and respiratory sounds via an acoustic tool; the medical procedure involving placing a device on the body to listen to internal noises for evaluation

Etymology: Stethoscopy is a modern formation, and its story starts with a shy doctor and a rolled-up notebook. In 1816, the French physician René Laennec was reluctant to press his ear directly against a young woman's chest to hear her heart, so he rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and listened through it. That improvised device became the stethoscope, from the Greek "stēthos" (chest) and "skopein" (to look at or examine). Laennec's name for the device appeared in print in 1819, when he published his treatise on mediate auscultation. The suffix "-y" turns the instrument's name into the name of the practice. Stethoscopy therefore means the act of examining the body by listening, built on a base that had existed in Greek for centuries but had never before referred to a listening tool. The Greek roots are ancient, but the compound is an early nineteenth-century coinage created for a new medical method.

Synonyms: auscultation