Tag Archives: cardiac auscultation

The past: a historical perspective The earliest description of the heart sounds comes from William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis in 1628, in which he likened the heart sounds to “two clacks of a water bellows to raise water”, but it was not until Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816 that cardiac auscultation superseded percussion and direct auscultation. Laennec proposed the use of “a cylinder of wood, perforated in its centre longitudinally, by a bore three lines in diameter, and formed so as to come apart in the middle”; this he termed the cylinder or stethoscope. This was followed in 1819 by his landmark work De