In 1816, exactly 200 years ago, Rene Laennec rolled a piece of paper into a cylinder to listen to the heartbeat of an overweight young lady. This was the beginning of modern day auscultation. Today, we find that the art of auscultation is fading. Many physicians, including most of us, order an echocardiogram on hearing a murmur.
We often do not try to make an effort to go into the finer points of clinical examination to ascertain the clinical diagnosis before filling the request form. Is it the lack of time, loss of clinical skills, lack of confidence, especially on the part of the younger generation of doctors who might not have been trained so rigorously on the use of a stethoscope, or perhaps the understanding that more accurate information is available from an echocardiogram? Looking at this from the point of view of diagnostic accuracy, there is no doubt that the stethoscope cannot…
