Wold's first stethoscope

René Laennec, born in 1781, was a French doctor and inventor. In 1816, he invented the very first stethoscope and made a hugely important contribution to modern medicine. He is also known as the father of clinical auscultation. But how he invented it has an interesting story!

At that time, auscultation was done by putting one’s ear against the patient’s chest, which was not only inadequate in the case of corpulent patients but also embarrassing when it came to examining female patients. When he was examining a young woman complaining of heart problems, he thought it was improper to place his ear on her chest.

He rolled a piece of paper into a tube and pressed it to her chest, and he was able to hear the heartbeats clearly – even more clearly and distinctly than he had ever been able to do by the immediate application of the ear.

He published the findings in 1819. His new instrument, made of wood, was given the name stethoscope, deriving from the Greek words stethos (chest) and skopos (examination). Laennec’s original stethoscope consisted of a hollow tube of wood that was 3.5 cm (1.4 inches) in diameter and 25 cm (10 inches) long, and it transmitted sound to only one ear.

Lina Medina : Youngest mother in medical history

Lina Medina is the youngest confirmed mother in medical history, giving birth at the age of five years, seven months and 17 days. She currently lives in Lima, the capital of Peru.
Medina was brought to a hospital by her parents at the age of five years due to increasing abdominal size. She was originally thought to have had a tumor, but her doctors determined she was in her seventh month of pregnancy. Dr. Gerardo Lozada took her to Lima, Peru, before the surgery to have other specialists confirm that Medina was pregnant.

Medina's son weighed 2.7 kg at birth and was named Gerardo after her doctor. Gerardo was raised believing that Medina was his sister, but found out at the age of 10 that she was his mother. He grew up healthy but died in 1979 at the age of 40 of a bone marrow disease.

Later life: Medina has never revealed the father of the child nor the circumstances of her impregnation. Dr. Escomel suggested she might not actually know herself by writing that Medina "couldn't give precise responses".

Although Lina's father was arrested on suspicion of child sexual abuse, he was later released due to lack of evidence, and the biological father who impregnated Lina was never identified. Additionally, there was no explanation of how a five-year-old girl could conceive a child.

In young adulthood, she worked as a secretary in the Lima clinic of Dr. Lozada, who gave her an education and helped put her son through high school. Medina later married Raúl Jurado, who fathered her second son in 1972. As of 2002, they lived in a poor district of Lima known as "Chicago Chico" ("Little Chicago"). She refused an interview with Reuters that year,just as she had turned away many reporters in years past.

Source: Knowledge Bank

WORLD'S FIRST TEST TUBE BABY

On July 25, 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world's first successful "test-tube" baby was born in Great Britain. Though the technology that made her conception possible was heralded as a triumph in medicine and science, it also caused many to consider the possibilities of future ill-use.

Brown was born to Lesley and John Brown, who had been trying to conceive for nine years, but without success because of Lesley's blocked fallopian tubes. On November 10, 1977, Lesley Brown underwent the procedure by Patrick Steptoe and Robert  Edwards.

She was born at 11:47 p.m. at Oldham General Hospital, Oldham, through a planned caesarean section delivered by registrar John Webster. She weighed 5 pounds, 12 ounces (2.608 kg) at birth. Her younger sister, Natalie Brown, was also conceived through IVF, four years later, and became the world's fortieth IVF baby, and the first one to give birth herself—naturally—in 1999.

Louise Brown married nightclub doorman Wesley Mullinder in 2004, with Dr. Edwards attending their wedding. Their son Cameron, conceived naturally, was born on December 20, 2006.