To resolve the limitations of immediate auscultation, a French doctor named Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781–1826) at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris invented the first stethoscope in 1816. During an examination of a patient, he was afforded few diagnostic clues from application of a hand to the chest or the commonly used percussion method. Reluctant to perform immediate auscultation on the young female patient, he used a rolled sheet of paper to create an aural tube and facilitate auscultation. He was excited to discover that the heart sounds were clearly audible, and this discovery later lead to the development of the first device specifically for this purpose.