Auenbrugger's percussion of the chest

A healthy chest, when tapped, gives back a muffled note. Leopold Auenbrugger likened it to a drum covered with a thick woollen cloth. Where that note was lost, and the chest sounded like a fleshy thigh when struck, he placed disease in the region beneath. He set out the method in Inventum novum, a Latin book of 95 pages printed in Vienna by Trattner in 1761.

Auenbrugger was born in 1722 and studied medicine in Vienna under Gerhard van Swieten, who already tapped the abdomen to tell fluid from gas. As a physician at the Spanish Military Hospital in Vienna, he spent seven years on the chest: examining patients, attending autopsies, and filling the chests of corpses with fluid to learn how an effusion sounded. Tradition holds that the idea began in his boyhood in Graz, where his father, an innkeeper, tapped wine casks to judge how full they were. The book also has a passage on nostalgia, the homesickness of drafted soldiers, which he believed could dull the resonance of the chest.

Vienna paid little attention. Van Swieten ignored the book, and so did his successor, Anton de Haen. The next professor, Maximilian Stoll, took it seriously and had percussion taught to students. One of them, Josef Eyerel, wrote a book on the method that came to the notice of Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, Napoleon's physician. Corvisart obtained a copy of the original and translated it into French in 1808. His pupil Laennec and, in Vienna, Joseph Skoda spread the method further, and John Forbes published an English translation in London in 1824.

Auenbrugger had left the hospital after ten years and built a successful private practice. He wrote the libretto for The Chimney Sweep, a three-act opera by Antonio Salieri performed at the Burgtheater in 1781, and was knighted by Emperor Joseph II in 1783. He died in 1809, a year after the French translation appeared.