On aegophony / by William H. Stone.

  • Stone, W. H. (William Henry), 1830-1891.
Date:
[1871?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On aegophony / by William H. Stone. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    By WILLIAM H. STONE, F.R.C.P., &c. {Reprinted from ' St. Thomas's Hospital Reports,' Vol. II.) No one auscultatory sign has been the subject of so much llebate as segophony. Every shade of opinion has been ex- ))ressed concerning it, from that of Skoda, which declares it to )')e diagnostically worthless, up to the original view of Laennec, Its discoverer, which held it to be pathognomonic of pleurisy, it has, therefore, in a sense, stood apart from the other acknow- (edged physical signs, and has been estimated at a variable and uncertain valuation. No person, however, who has practised auscultation to any '^xtent can doubt of its striking character as a physical pheno- laenon. Every now and then, in the examination of a case, it uddenly rings out with such force and clearness as to be abso- lutely startling. For this very reason, perhaps, it has been less dosely studied than it would have been otherwise, the observer ;ontenting himself with substantiating the fact and passing on I o other indications. It has long occurred to me that this, as well as many other of i)ur auscultatory phenomena, required re-examination in the light );»f modern researches, specially those of Helmholtz, on acoustics. .'. have endeavoured, on his method, first to analyse the sonorous dements into their constituents, and then to reconstitute the ^vhole results by a synthetical process of a mechanical nature. 'X was just in this fashion that the distinguished physicist in i[uestion attained to his great discovery of the formation of .'^owel-sounds during articulate speech; first, by applying a eries of resonators to decompose the compound sound; and hen, having isolated its harmonic elements, recompounding