Stethoscope

Harris and Rice's book is well-researched and accessible. Although it also sheds light on the use of the stethoscope outside of the medical world, and includes literature and art installations, it will probably still primarily convince readers who have professional connections with the stethoscope or who recognise it from their favourite TV programme. -- Johanna Kuroczik * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *
Stethoscope offers a concise cultural history of a quintessential medical icon. Through a review of literature, art, and less renowned cultural contexts, Harris and Rice present a new take on a well-told history. They illustrate both the mainstream historical narrative of the stethoscope and refreshingly new compilations of unconventional viewpoints. Readers who think they know the history of the stethoscope may be surprised to learn about variation across historical, geographical, and nonmedical contexts. Beyond historical facts, Stethoscope presents cultural and symbolic impacts of the stethoscope over time. Tracing the historical and cultural context of the medical instrument pushes the reader to analyze the broader transitions in doctor-patient relationships. At a time when virtual patients and telemedicine are on the rise, Stethoscope serves as a crucial reminder for clinicians to be present at the bedside, use their senses, and listen carefully to their patients. * H-Sci-Med-Tech *
A vital device for healthcare professionals, the stethoscope has come to be recognised as a symbol of medicine itself. It listens to what your body says, so let's hear it for the stethoscope. * The Sunday Post, Scotland *
This is a riveting, supremely readable cultural history of a crucial piece of medical equipment that was originally dismissed as a “newfangled and ridiculous plaything”. It abounds with rich, lesser-known language (pectriloquism, placental souffle, borborygmi – the last a term for gurgling noises in the gut). Most of all, it’s a passionate manifesto for the art and labour of listening itself, the importance of touch and smell, the enduring need – in an era when remote and digital approaches to healthcare are constantly talked up – for doctors to value their work as an ongoing practice in (and of) proximity, intimacy, connection. * Sukhdev Sandhu, Director of the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, New York University *
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 *