Expert Commentary: Minimally Invasive GI and HPB Surgical Oncology

My interest in Medicine as a career began during doctor visit when I was young. I remember the pediatrician asking me to take deep breaths when he placed the stethoscope on my chest and back to listen to my heart and lungs. I could conceptualize what he was doing, and I wanted to understand it better. How did the stethoscope work, and who invented it? Later, I read about Rene Laënnec, the “father of clinical auscultation” and his early descriptions of thoracic and abdominal pathology with “mediate” (through a wooden tube) rather than “immediate” auscultation (placing one’s ear directly on the patient) in the early 1800s [1]. It was a leap forward in medicine, and had we stopped there we would all carry blocks of wood in our lab coats and miss out on the tremendous diagnostic power of the modern stethoscope.