That cultural symbol of medics – from Kenneth Williams in Carry On Doctor to Edie Falcon's Nurse Jackie – is being replaced by cheaper and more accurate ultrasound devices
If you Google "Hugh Laurie" and "stethoscope", you will come up with a clutch of stories from February 2012 about how everybody's favourite pill-popping misanthropic physician is "hanging up his stethoscope" after eight seasons on the hit show House.
This underlines a more general truth: doctors don't retire, they hang up their stethoscopes. Is there any profession so proverbially connected to one tool of their trade? Will people believe you are a doctor if you don't wear one?
These questions become topical because the stethoscope is reportedly becoming obsolete, nearly 200 years after it was invented. Is it anything to do with the finding that a third of US stethoscopes used in emergencies were contaminated with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria? No, but it probably didn't help.
Rather, according to this month's edition of the World Heart Federation's journal, Global Heart, the stethoscope is being replaced by more accurate and cheaper hand-held ultrasound devices.
Upsetting news – at least for popular culture. What is every TV medic – from Kenneth Williams's Dr Tinkle in Carry On Doctor to Edie Falco's Nurse Jackie – without a stethoscope? And if, as the Global Heart report suggests, the handheld ultrasound devices that doctors of the future will be using look just like smartphones, how will we be able to tell the medics from the civilians in Casualty or Holby City?
But there's good news. If the stethoscope does become obsolete, it will also spell the end for one excrescence: a T-shirt targeted at medical students saying "Keep calm and carry a stethoscope."
The man who invented the stethoscope nearly 200 years ago was shy. French physician René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec dreaded placing his ear on the patient's chest, especially when the patient was a woman. No offence to Laënnec, but his patients probably didn't care for it either, especially if he had cold and/or especially hairy ears.
Shyness is the unsung mother of invention. It's why Finns at Nokia invented texting (they couldn't bear face-to-face rejection when proposing dates) and why in 1816 Dr Laënnec came up with his auscultatory prosthesis (initially, a tube).
Only later, as TV history tells us, did stethoscopes become more sophisticated. In the 60s, Richard Chamberlain's Dr Kildare wore a stethoscope from a brand called Thumpy, whose earpieces clipped around the neck. By the time ER came along in the mid-90s, TV medics were wearing them with the tube around the neck like rubberised stoles. "The problem with that," says a GP acquaintance, "is they look cool but keep falling off." Only a doctor could use "cool" and "stethoscope" in the same sentence.
How fortunate for Laënnec that he died before he could see the sexist uses to which popular culture would put his invention. In the 1957 film Doctor at Large, Dirk Bogarde's Dr Simon Sparrow uses a stethoscope during an examination of a girl who's been having chest problems. "Big breaths, Eva." "Yeth, and I'm only 16." Oh Lord: if that's what the stethoscope is going to be used for, it is just as well it is becoming obsolete.
But is it? If we have learned nothing else from Star Trek, it's that, in the future, physicians – some of them aliens, admittedly – will be using stethoscopes. Who can forget that scene in which Phlox, the Denobulan chief medical officer aboard the Enterprise, treated the Klingon Klaang while wearing a (funky, space-agey) stethoscope? Not me. Rumours of the death of the stethoscope may be exaggerated.
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