The introduction provides an outline of the so-called acoustic turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when emerging scientific constructions of sound and its movement through the material world rendered that world audible in new and exciting ways. It argues that the new acoustic culture of the nineteenth century raised questions as to what lay beyond the limits of the human ear or scientific instrument and pointed to the existence of an inaccessible, intangible space between sound and silence, whose boundaries could not be measured and were always inherently unstable. That space, beyond the limited powers of human sensitivity, was a rich source of scientific, literary, and broader cultural reflection throughout the period. I delineate the volume’s progression through a series of auditory thresholds, each of which was brought to prominent scientific or medical attention in the period while becoming the subject of literary response and experimentation.

The invention of the stethoscope by the French physician René Laennec in 1816 was a pivotal moment in the burgeoning field of modern clinical diagnosis. It brought the inner soundscape of the human body – an invisible realm which largely existed beyond the range of the human ear – into not only medical but also more general cultural awareness. This chapter considers the stethoscope as the subject not of ongoing scientific debate and experimentation, but of poetry and fiction, as tales of its use and abuse, as well as its supposed powers, spread among those who first encountered it and sowed a more general sense of confusion, mistrust, and corporeal anxiety in relation to the medical consultation. Drawing on interactions with the stethoscope in works by Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Sheridan Le Fanu, as well as short stories and poetry from popular periodicals, I demonstrate that, as medical institutions accepted new technologies and became increasingly specialized throughout the century, the stethoscope became for many patients an object of anxious contemplation, serving as a palpable interface between doctor and patient, between hope and fear, and between the visible and the invisible.