Medical Inventions That Were Created For The Strangest Reasons

Stethoscope

Creator(s): René Laennec

French physician and inventor René Laennec created the very first stethoscope in the early 19th century. Due to now dating back to 1812, the invention has been critical to the world of medicine for over 200 years. Interestingly, Laennec actually invented the stethoscope for what some might find to be a strange reason. At the time, doctors used to listen to heartbeats in one of two ways. Either putting their head onto a patient’s chest or via a small device that could isolate the heartbeat enough to listen. Laennec did the former but felt uncomfortable placing his ear against the chest of female patients. Today, the stethoscope is one of the few medical inventions to last as long as it has and is still being used by doctors worldwide.

Psychic Surgery Being Performed In The Philippines — *[Image via Microgen/Shutterstock.com]*

Psychic Surgery Tools

Creator(s): Mala Cosa, Eleuterio Terte, Tony Agpaoa (earliest practitioners)

We’ve actually covered the world of psychics and other things connected to the occult on our sister website, Science Sensei. If you find psychics alone to be problematic, you’ll probably hate psychic surgery tools. These tools were developed in the mid-1900s for surgical procedures that claimed to be capable of removing tumors and other diseases through non-physical means. What’s so funny here is that these “surgeries” would be done with one’s bare hands, using sleight-of-hand tricks. Fake blood would be utilized as well as animal parts to convince someone that horrible things were removed from their body. The “tools” in this case were the hands and any incision they claimed to make magically healed…well, because there was never an incision, to begin with.

Where Do We Find This Stuff? Here Are Our Sources:

United States Food And Drug Administration (FDA)

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

National Public Radio (NPR)

Association Of Anaesthetists

Harvard University

Cornell University

San Diego State University

Reuters

New York Times

The Atlantic

The Washington Post

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