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 Stethoscope

The word stethoscope is derived from the two Greek words, stethos (chest) and scopos (examination). Stethoscope is an acoustic medical device for auscultation, or listening to the internal sounds of human and animal body, like sound of the heart, lungs or respiratory, blood flow in arteries or veins, and sound in the digestive system of human and animal. Stethoscopes can also be used to check scientific vacuum chambers for leaks, and for various other small-scale acoustic monitoring tasks. It typically has a small disc-shaped resonator that is placed against the chest, and two tubes connected to earpieces

The stethoscope was invented in France in 1816 by Rene Laennec at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. In the beginning, he had a difficulties to detecting hearbeats in patients with heart disease without using a tool and he was uncomfortable placing his ear on women's chests to hear heart sounds. So he thinks to find a tool that can be used to listen a person’s heartbeat without put his ears in the patient’s chest. He observed that a rolled notebook, placed between the patient's chest and his ear, could amplify heart sounds without requiring physical contact. Then, he create a tool called a stethoscope with a length of 25 cm and a cylinder diameter of 2.5 cm made of hollow wood, then perfected into three pieces that can be released. Rene's stethoscope, then perfected by Nicholas P Comins in 1829. He created a stethoscope that can hear the pulse with both ears. This is a stethoscope that we know until today.

Stethoscope have many function in the medical field. The function is to hear and diagnose a variety of sound and disorders function and heart rate or various types of heart disease and abnormalities other. It is can also to hear the sound of lung and the sound of breathing normal and abnormal, to hear the sound of the arteries and a blood pressure someone, and to hear the sound and damage peristaltic intestine and digestive tract.

The advantages of a stethoscope can enable the medical to listen the sound of heart, lungs and intestines. Every abnormal function in the body system can immediately identified with the appropriate use of stethoscope. The loss of stethoscope is since this tool enlarged sound, the sound too hard can be potentially against the damage to the ear listener. Stethoscope, if not well maintained and cleaned routinely then can spread the germs and viruses in the examiner. Therefore, potential spread of germs and viruses is so great and even more when it is done on patient that has infectious disease.