Clinicians now use ultrasound to diagnose pneumonia, cirrhosis, detached retinas, bowel obstructions, and aortic dissection, among other problems. Soon, the instrument may be more ubiquitous than the stethoscope.
The patient, a man in his early twenties, hobbled into the E.R. on a Wednesday morning, anxious and gasping, his shirt covered in blood. Minneapolis in the nineteen-eighties was experiencing an increase in violent crime that would later earn it the nickname Murderapolis; at Hennepin County Medical Center, the city’s safety-net hospital, stabbings and gunshot wounds had become commonplace.
Ultrasound is an old technology, with roots in the sonar scanners used during the Second World War. For decades, it’s been used mainly to inspect fetuses while they’re still in the womb, and to examine diseased hearts. But, in the past few decades, rapid advances in computer technology, combined with the trial-and-error work of clinicians, have transformed ultrasound into a powerful diagnostic instrument for everything from damaged organs to tuberculosis.
The stethoscope, medicine’s most totemic object, had faced similar obstacles. In 1816, a physician named René Laennec was treating a young woman with cardiac disease; worried about the impropriety of putting his ear directly to her chest, he rolled a piece of paper into a tube, placing his ear at one end and his patient at the other. To his surprise, he found he could hear heart and lung sounds more clearly than with his ear alone.
Many early ultrasound boosters had envisioned this scenario. But experimenters in fields as diverse as ophthalmology, rheumatology, and orthopedics also seized on the technology, and they have pushed its boundaries far beyond the emergency setting.
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