19th Century Technological Innovations

The Technological Innovations in the Medical Field during the 19th Century
Keianna Fernandez
Taft College

Abstract
Réne-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec invention is still used in medical practice today and his painstaking work provided correlation of sounds of the chest with pathological findings at autopsy, thus linking the signs of physical diagnosis at the bedside with organ pathology.
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The Technological Innovations in the Medical Field during the 19th Century
It could be argued that the discovery of the stethoscope and X-ray are two of the most pivotal steps in medical technology, however, both Réne-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec and Wilhelm Conrad Rötgen inventions were founded almost completely by accident.
Laennec spent the next three years testing various types of materials to make tubes to perfect his design while working at the Necker Hospital in Paris and made highly scientific and useful descriptions of his clinical findings on auscultation related to chest disease (Weinberg, 1993) . Laënnec studied many chests, comparing his observations with postmortem findings. “He learned to recognize pneumonia, bronchiectasis, pleurisy, emphysema, pneumothorax, phthisis, and other lung diseases from the sounds he heard with his stethoscope” (Venita, 2000). In the end, he preferred a cylinder tube of wood, an inch and a half diameter and a foot long, that was hollowed out in the center into a funnel-shape, and can be disassembled into two divided portions for portability and storage convenience. Conclusively he named his instrument the Stethoscope from the Greek words stethos, meaning chest, and skopein, meaning to explore. Even on his deathbed in 1826, as he handed down his scientific papers to his nephew, he knew that his invention was the epitome of his career and recognized that his discovery revolutionized diagnosis of diseases of the chest. Laënnec died at Kerlouanec on August 13, 1826 at the age of 45
Professor of Physics in Worzburg, Bavaria, Wilhelm Conrad Rötgen’s invention of the x-ray created an amazing step forward in the history of medicine. For the first time ever, the inner workings of the body could be made visible without having to cut into the flesh.
On November 8, 1895, Roentgen noticed that when he shielded the tube with heavy black cardboard, the green fluorescent light caused a platinobarium screen nine feet at away to glow - too far away to be reacting to the cathode rays as he understood them. He determined the fluorescence was caused by invisible rays originating from the Crookes tube he was using to study cathode rays (later recognized as electrons), which penetrated the opaque black paper wrapped around the