The Osler Hearing Aid

Sir William Osler was the father of modern medicine; he wrote the first western medical textbook and founded several major training programs that still exist today - including mine.  He was dedicated to medicine to a degree we seldom see, but he was also a man of letters with a broad knowledge of literature, classical languages and a knack for pithy aphorisms.  One of my favorite is, "Look wise. Say nothing, and grunt.  Speech was given to conceal thought." (You must imagine facing a new patient with a very peculiar story - you need time to think - so pinch your chin, looking thoughtfully over your glasses, and say "hrrmmm.'').

I served on the Osler medical service in inner city Baltimore from 2000-2003.  Serving on 'the O' was exhausting, often difficult, occasionally cruel, but never, ever dull.  Inner city Baltimore was, while not quite as poverty-stricken as Bangladesh, quite similar.  Oh the stories...

We had bright blue and yellow disposable stethoscopes on the 'O' used for patients in isolation due to 'superbugs' - multi drug resistant bacteria.  We used to use these stethoscopes to talk to particularly hard-of-hearing patients, like this:

The Osler Hearing Aid, imported to BD

It worked remarkably well.  I particularly recall one elderly african-american gentleman who I could get no straight story about - I'd been told he was demented.  Family was not around and he seemed apathetic - he would neither answer a single question nor even look at me.  I learned later that he'd sunk into this apathy because he'd not been able to have a single conversation in the previous ten years due to hearing loss.

I grabbed an 'Osler hearing aid' and, placing it in his ears, asked, "How are you today, Sir?"

He looked up, startled, and said, "I'm fine, thank you!" and what followed was a relatively standard interview, albeit through a stethoscope.  At the end of the interview, he looked at me, with tears brimming, and asked how much a stethoscope cost and where he could get one.  

I answered, "This one is yours to keep when you leave the hospital."  Several months later I saw him walking down the street in East Baltimore, with a bright blue stethoscope jauntily tossed over his shoulder.