THE MAGIC STETHOSCOPE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 77, 9 July 1910, Page 9

THE MAGIC STETHOSCOPE

MR. BROWX AND HIS WONDERFUL INVENTION. Mr. S. t). Brown, the young engineer, whose wonderful invention has made it possible for a doctor to hear the heartbeats of a patient a hundred miles away, lectured at the Royal Society of Arts before the Institute of Electrical Engineers (says a London message). He explained in technical language how and why ft is that, with the help of his new reply, the ticking of a watch at one end of a telephone can be heard at the other, while "wireless signals" that are inaudible to the unaided car can be read by an operator several yards from the receiving instrument. Still more striking wos the description of Mr. Brown's electric stethoscope, which raises the intensity of the sounds within the human body twenty times and more.

"At the invitation of two physicians/' said the inventor, "I took the instrument to the London Hospital, where it was tested upon a number of diseased heart eases. When the instrument was applied directly to the heart, the sound of the 'beats given out in the telephone was uncomfortably loud and easily heard •by the patient, and all those who stood round, and this even if the telephone were in position on the head of the operator. On other occasions the passage of air through the lungs was heard like the roar of the wind through a forest.

' Several of the men of science who were present spoke warmly of the invention. "I believe," said Dr. Volsey, ''that we shall be able to hear sounds in the body which we have hitherto only suspected—sounds such as that of the passage of blood over a surface roughened by disease."