science · 19 November 1722 · 302 years ago
birth
Born 19 Nov 1722; died 17 May 1809 at age 86.
Austrian physician who devised the diagnostic technique of percussion (the art of striking a surface part of the body with short, sharp taps to diagnose the condition of the parts beneath the sound). With this technique, he could estimate the amount of fluid in a patient's chest and the size of his/her heart. (As a boy he had tapped the wine barrels in his father's cellar to find how full they were.) After seven years of investigation, he published the method in Inventum Novum (1761), though his technique did not gain recognition and acceptance until years after his death. When a translator republished the work in French (1808) the method gained acceptance around the world, and through time to the present as a fundamental diagnostic procedure.
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