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where the Greeks said there were, for example - but they insisted upon believing the books instead of their own eyes.
It was from the 1600s onward in Europe that scientists gradually began to pay more attention to their own observations. They perceived disease not as a curse, nor as due to the movements of the planets, but as part of the natural, earthly world. And they did not look to the writings of the ancient Greeks to explain this phenomenon: they believed that they could discover the truth about disease through their own experience. For instance, Laennec, reflecting on the common observation that tuberculosis patients often felt better when they were at the seashore, wondered if the seaweed on the beach was the key to curing the disease. He decided to see for himself by conducting an experiment. He laid seaweed on the floor around the hospital beds for several patients and gave them seaweed tea for four months and watched to see if they improved. teh ward did begin to smell like the seashore, and the patients said they felt better, but Laennec saw no conclusive improvement. Laennec considered the treatment a failure, but felt he had learned something: he had learned that seaweed was not what made the seashore healthful. Thus the experiment was a success.
Self-portrait of a tubercular Rene Laennec in 1820, six years before his death.
It was the desire to make better observations that inspired Laennec to devise the stethoscope. Before Keats's century, the only way doctors investigated to see if lungs were full of fluid and therefore diseased was by the Greek physician Hippocrates' method of shaking the patient by the shoulders and listening for a splash. In 1761 the doctor son of an Austrian innkeeper, Leopold Auenbrugger, came up with an ingenious new idea. Just as his father had rapped on the side of casks of wine or beer to tell how much was in them, so could a person rap on the side of someone's chest to tell how fluid-filled the lungs were. The healthy, empty lung made a sound like a drum when the chest was tapped, but the damaged lung made a dull thud. Auenbrugger's idea was dismissed at first, but was revived around 1800, at the time when Laennec was studying medicine.
Both Auenbrugger's method, known as percussion, and the other available way to investigate the chest, listening by pressing the ear against the skin, had their drawbacks. Women's breasts could make both methods impractical and indelicate, and fat on a patient of either sex could get in the way. But it was just these obstacles that led Laennec to discover a better way to investigate.