[François Joseph Double and auscultation]

François-Joseph Double, co-founder of the Académie de Médecine, was one of those doctors who, right at the beginning of the nineteenth century, developped the accurate observation of the clinical signs of illness, which called earlier practice into question. This led him to study the unaided auscultation of respiratory and cardiac ailments. Shortly before Laennec's fundamental discovery of aided auscultation, Double was describing different sorts of sounds such as those which would later be called tubal breathing, and pulmonary rales or crackles; listening to the heart, he concentrated on problems of the beat, on unusual sounds but did not know how to link them to any specific ailment. The fact that his findings precede those of Laennec have not allowed him the recognition that his pioneering work deserves.