BODY SOUNDS
Student
The effects of the stethoscope on physicians were analogous to the effects of printing on Western culture. Print and the reproducible book had created a new private world for man. He could isolate himself with the book and ponder its messages. As the sociologist David Riesman comments: "As long as the spoken or sung word monopolized the symbolic environment, it is particularly impressive; but once books enter that environment it can never be quite the same again—books are, so to speak, the gunpowder of the mind. Books bring with them detachment and a critical attitude that is not possible in an oral tradition." Similarly, auscultation helped to create the objective physician, who could move away from involvement with the patient's experiences and sensations, to a more detached relation, less with the patient but more with the sounds from within the body. Undistracted by the motives and beliefs of the patient, the auscultator could make a diagnosis from sounds that he alone heard emanating from body organs, sounds that he believed to be objective, bias-free representations of the disease process.
