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You know those phones made with two cans and a string between them? Well, the stethoscope works more or less the same way as this crude communicator: the device transmits the sound waves, preventing the sound from being lost in the air. The little noise of our heartbeats and the other sounds produced inside our body may not be the most audible naturally, but they are still sounds. And any sound picked up by the stethoscope’s earpiece – that metal part that the doctor touches the patient – is amplified through an internal structure that mimics the human ear. The amplified sound goes through the conduction tubes, passes through the metal rod and reaches the doctor’s ear through the ear tips. It’s been like this since 1816, when the French physician René Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec developed the first stethoscope, which transmitted a much less clear sound, but even so, it already fulfilled the function it has today.
The earpiece is the only active part of the stethoscope. The rest just resounds the noise
1. The metal piece placed in contact with the patient’s body is called a chestpiece. It is double-sided: on one side, the diaphragm and, on the other, the bell.
2. The diaphragm is used to pick up high-frequency sounds, such as those from the lungs and abdomen. It consists of a thin circular membrane made of plastic material. The sounds of our body make this membrane vibrate, creating new acoustic waves.
3. The bell is best suited for perceiving low frequency sounds such as heartbeats. It has no membrane. Sound is captured due to the conical shape, which conducts sound waves to the hole at the bottom of the cone.
4. The acoustic waves captured, either by the bell or by the diaphragm, follow through the conduction tube, a hollow and flexible structure made of a special type of rubber that prevents the leakage of sound
5. The metallic rod, also hollow, is an extension of the tubes, whose function is to connect them to the ear plugs, those little rubber pieces that fit in the ear.