Leopold Auenbrugger

Leopold Auenbrugger
Leopold Auenbrugger and his wife Marianne
Born	19 November 1722 Graz, Duchy of Styria
Died	17 May 1809 (1809-05-18) (aged 86) Vienna, Austrian Empire
Nationality	Austrian
Fields	medicine
Known for	percussion (medicine)

Josef Leopold Auenbrugger or Avenbrugger (19 November 1722 – 17 May 1809), also known as Leopold von Auenbrugger, was the Austrian physician who invented percussion as a diagnostic technique. On the strength of this discovery, he is considered one of the founders of modern medicine.

Auenbrugger was a native of Graz in Styria, an Austrian province. His father, a hotel keeper, gave his son every opportunity for an excellent preliminary education in his native town and then sent him to Vienna to complete his studies at the university. Auenbrugger was graduated as a physician at the age of 22 and then entered the Spanish Military Hospital of Vienna, where he spent 10 years.

He found out that, by applying his ear to the patient and tapping lightly on the chest, one could assess the texture of underlying tissues and organs. This technique of percussive diagnosis had its origins in testing the level of wine casks in the cellar of his father's hotel. With this method, he was able to plot outlines of the heart. It was the first time that a physician could relatively accurately and objectively determine an important sign of diseases. He published his findings in a booklet, but nobody paid much attention to it.

During his ten years of patient study, Auenbrugger confirmed his observations on the diagnostic value of percussion by comparison with post-mortem specimens, and besides made a number of experimental researches on dead bodies. He injected fluid into the pleural cavity, and showed that it was perfectly possible by percussion to tell exactly the limits of the fluid present, and thus to decide when and where efforts should be made for its removal.

His name is also associated with Auenbrugger's sign, a bulging of the epigastric region in the thorax, in cases of large effusions of the pericardium, the membrane which envelops the heart.