Laennec: Inventor of the Stethoscope

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The Student of Paris

Born in 1781 in Quimper, Brittany, René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec lost his mother to tuberculosis when he was just five years old. He was raised by an uncle who was a physician, and by his teens he was already assisting in a military hospital. He arrived in Paris to study medicine in 1800 — one of the most brilliant students of his generation — determined to understand the diseases of the chest that had taken so many lives, including his mother's.