Issue 11/2023
Dobrin Paskalev, Diana Petkova
Medical University – Varna
Abstract
In the year 2022 we celebrate the 300th anniversary of Leopold Auenbrugger’s birth, a famous Viennese physician who developed and introduced the percussion technique to the medical practice. Auenbrugger was born on 19.11.1722 in Graz, Austria, in a family of innkeepers. He received his medical education in the Viennese faculty of medicine where his tutor and professor was the famous doctor and chemist Gerhard van Swieten (1700-1772). From 1752 till 1758 the young doctor worked at the Spanish military hospital in Vienna and in the period 1758-1762 he was in charge of the internal division there. He daily confronted severe cases of lung illnesses mostly caused by pulmonary tuberculosis. Often they were accompanied by pleural effusions, that were undetectable in life and were found only on the autopsy table. For 7 years Auenbrugger was developing a physical method which he decided to call percussion with which it was made possible to diagnose the effusions in the thorax. As a result of his studies was his famous work which he published in Vienna in 1761 by the title „Inventum novum ex percussione thoracis humani ut signo abstrusos interni pectoris morbos detegendi“ („A new Discovery that Enables the Physician from the Percussion of the Human Thorax to Detect the Diseases Hidden Within the Chest“). In his work he describes not only the pathological findings by the pulmonary illness, but gave a classical description of the heart aneurism and pericardial effusion. In 1808 Jean Nicolas Corvisart (1755-1822), the personal physician of Napoleon Bonapartem, later recognized „Inventum novum“ and translated it in French, and added his own observations reminding in the prefece that the sole developer of the technique was Auenbrugger. In this way the percussion technique found fame in the medical world and together whit the discovery of the auscultation technique by stethoscope by R. Laennec in 1816 widen the diagnostic capability by the bed of the patient.
Key words: L. Auenbrugger, percussion, Inventum Novum
Address for correspondence: Assoc Prof Dobrin Paskalev, MD, PhD,
Medical College, Medical University of Varna,
55, Marin Drinov-str; 9000 Varna;
e-mail: dobrinpaskalev@yahoo.com
tel: 00359-887-765-313