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In his book, Bad Medicine, David Wootton makes an interesting remark about the symbolism of the stethoscope. It was invented in 1816 by René Laennec out of a problem in gender politics: the norm for female patients of the all male doctor fraternity was to be examined with their clothes on. Thus, the doctor could not lay his head against the chest of the patient and listen to the sound of what was going on inside. Laennec was concerned with phthisis, a nosological category that has now been subsumed as tuberculosis. The stethoscope was a true advance: doctors became much better at diagnosing phthisis. But therein lies the historical burden of Wootton’s book: “Phthisis no longer exists as a disease: we now call it tuberculosis because we think of it as an infectious disease caused by a speci fi c micro-organism. The same sounds in   a stethoscope that would once have led to a diagnosis of phthisis now leads to tests to con fi rm tuberculosis. But there is an important di ff er