Chapter 1 - Accessing the Sounds of the Body

Summary

Chapter 1 explores medical and wider cultural responses to the arrival of the stethoscope in British medical practice. Although they provided new medical insights into the workings of the human body and its pathologies, new technologies like the stethoscope were a source of not only practical, social, and professional challenges but also deep confusion, mistrust, and corporeal anxiety. Music, language, and literature, I argue, all played an active role by providing conceptual frameworks for the scientific exploration and interpretation of a new auditory realm, while proffering imaginative explorations of its potential physical and, at times, metaphysical significance. I consider the stethoscope as the subject not only of ongoing scientific debate and experimentation but also of poetry and fiction, as tales of its use and abuse, as well as its supposed powers, spread from among those who first encountered it.