Listening to the Body Electric - continued...

Part 4: Electron-tube Amplification and the Electrostethoscope

After the First World War, the dissemination of tube-based amplifiers contributed to improve the graphical recording of weak currents. But even then, scientists did not completely turn away from listening.

In 1919, Rudolf Höber (1873 - 1953) repeated the sonic mapping of electrical activity in muscles and nerves with the help of a tube amplifier and a telephone. At the same time, Höber discussed the sounds described by Bernstein and Wedensky some thirty years earlier. He listened to the sounds of contractions in patients suffering from certain diseases that affected their muscular or nervous activity, and produced graphic recordings of the corresponding currents. Höber concluded that these recordings were "largely concordant" with the facts he had established through listening (Höber 1919, p. 310).

In addition, Höber launched an innovative sonic pedagogy. He proposed to amplify body sounds like the heartbeat for demonstrative purposes and suggested the use of similar technologies for teaching medical auscultation and other techniques of scientific listening to larger groups of students.

The Austrian electrophysiologist Ferdinand Scheminzky (1899 - 1973) seized upon Höber's suggestion and constructed what he called an electrostethoscope in the mid‑1920s. Scheminsky’s device consisted of an amplifier and several telephones which was used to investigate bodily sounds. At the same time, it served for the transmission of amplified signals to a graphical recording device and the study of bioelectrical phenomena in muscles and nerves (Scheminzky 1927). As a result, the electrostethoscope unified two fields of scientific listening that had been important in the 19th century, i.e. medical diagnosis through mediate auscultation and electrophysiological research with the aid of the telephone.