Understanding Lung Sounds by Steven Lehrer, M.D.

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SEEKING SOUND FILMSTRIPS FOR PRESERVATION. Sound filmstrip was a 35mm film-based still image educational media format used in schools and industry. I am the only person on earth preserving American filmstrips. The media format is largely forgotten and very endangered. If you have any American filmstrips, or can rescue any filmstrips from a school, college, business, industry, or elsewhere, please contact me immediately at uncommon.ephemera@gmail.com. Don't know what a filmstrip is? Read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmstrip

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NOTES

While it is believed that doctors performed auscultation, or listening to body sounds, for diagnostic purposes as early as Ancient Egypt, the stethoscope is a relatively modern invention, having been introduced in France in only 1816. But even then, in order to hear a specific body sound, one had to have a body available making that sound, which was not always convenient nor possible.

After the introduction of sound recording, researchers began searching for ways to use the technology to further diagnostic medicine. In the 1950s, the phonopneumogram was developed; a procedure by which stethoscope-like microphones were attached to the chest and photographs produced of their output on an oscilloscope and the sounds plotted on a spectrogram, showing frequency energy over time. Breath sounds affected by different diseases and maladies looked distinctly different; and so could be further defined.

But for the medical student in the early 80s, who would carry a stethoscope and not an oscilloscope for the majority if not the entirety of her career, it is the recordings themselves that would be the important study tool. Recognizing this, Staff Physician and instructor at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine of the City University of New York Dr. Steven Lehrer produced this cassette to accompany his textbook of the same name, Understanding Lung Sounds.

While a medical student might not find anything particularly unusual about this recording, the first thing a layperson might notice is the listener is instructed to listen to the tape by holding his stethoscope up to the speaker. This archivist does not know enough about medicine nor the human body to understand why this doesn't make the audio on the tape sound like it's going through *two* stethoscopes, as the sounds are still passing through the skin to reach the microphones, but rest assured we at Uncommon Ephemera feel immediate empathy for the roommates of med students who blasted this tape in their dorm rooms just to hear a fraction of it through their stethoscopes.

Dr. Lehrer himself is not explicitly credited as the narrator of the recording, but he later appeared on a History Channel documentary entitled "Mavericks, Miracles, and Medicine," and this provides a reference to confirm his voice is in fact the one heard on this tape.

In the preface to the textbook, Dr. Lehrer says that "researchers hope eventually to construct a computerized electronic device to 'listen' to the chest and then produce a data printout of information that can now be obtained only with multiple pulmonary function tests." One has to wonder, almost forty years on, which notion ended up being more fantastical: "computerized electronic" technology used to make humans' lives easier instead of being used to embroil them in always-on psychological abuse and leaving them in constant fight-or-flight, or a healthcare industry whose purpose was to cure disease rather than to prolong life with disease in order to create repeat business.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in Ephemeral films

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Credit

W.B Saunders Company

Language

English

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed