Stethoscope: The Making of a Medical Icon

(Hardback)

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Description

A surprising investigation of a scientific instrument long at the pulse of medicine.

This book explores the colourful past, present and future of an instrument that is, quite literally, close to our hearts. The stethoscope has become the symbol of medicine itself how did this come to be What makes the stethoscope such a familiar and yet charismatic object Drawing from a range of fields including history, anthropology, science, technology and sound studies, the book illustrates the variety of roles the stethoscope has played over time. It shows that the stethoscope is not, and has never been, a single entity. It is used to a variety of ends, serves a number of purposes and is open to many interpretations. This is the key to the stethoscope's enduring presence in the medical and popular imagination.

Reviews

"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

Author Bio

Anna Harris is an Associate Professor of the Social Study of Medicine in the Department of Society Studies at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her previous books include A Sensory Education (2021). Tom Rice is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Exeter, specializing in sound and auditory culture. He is the author of Hearing and the Hospital: Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience (2013).