Stethoscope

"""It listens to what your body says, so let's hear it for the stethoscope. A vital device for healthcare professionals, [this] one instrument has come to be a recognized as a symbol of medicine itself.""-- ""Sunday Post"" ""This is a riveting, supremely readable cultural history of a crucial piece of medical equipment that was originally dismissed as a 'newfangled and ridiculous plaything.' It abounds with rich, lesser-known language (pectriloquism, placental souffle, borborygmi - the last a term for gurgling noises in the gut). Most of all, it's a passionate manifesto for the art and labor of listening itself, the importance of touch and smell, the enduring need--in an era when remote and digital approaches to healthcare are constantly talked up--for doctors to value their work as an ongoing practice in (and of) proximity, intimacy, connection.""--Sukhdev Sandhu, Director of the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, New York University ""Readers who think they know the history of the stethoscope may be surprised to learn about variation across historical, geographical, and nonmedical contexts. . . . At a time when virtual patients and telemedicine are on the rise, Stethoscope serves as a crucial reminder for clinicians to be present at the bedside, use their senses, and listen carefully to their patients.""-- ""H-Sci-Med-Tech"" ""A unique and impressively informative history of a universally recognized medical instrument and symbol, Stethoscope: The Making of a Medical Icon is an exceptional study and unreservedly recommended.""-- ""Midwest Book Review"" ""An object lesson in the importance in thinking with things, this tightly written volume reveals the contradictory and enduring value of the stethoscope: a device that trains healthcare providers to listen carefully to their patients' most intimate interiors while simultaneously helping to keep them quite literally at arm's length. Sparkling with ethnographic and historical insights, Stethoscope is a fresh and timely exegesis of this most familiar metonym of modern medicine.""--Jeremy A. Greene, William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine"