Josef Skoda

SKODA, Josef (1805–1881), a prominent German clinician, one of the most prominent representatives of the so-called young ("new") Vienna school. He graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Vienna in 1831. From 1833, he was a junior physician at the Vienna Allgemeines Krankenhaus. From 1846 to 1871, he was a full professor and head of the therapeutic clinic at the University of Vienna. He was the first in Vienna to begin lecturing in German. Skoda's main contribution to medicine...

is his treatise on auscultation and percussion—«Abhandlung über Perkussion und Auskulation» (Wien, 1839)—which gives reason to consider Skoda one of the founders of physical diagnostics. Skoda made attempts to classify the sound phenomena during percussion of the chest according to their pitch and timbre: dull-clear, tympanic-muffled, high-low, etc. He also described the so-called Skoda's resonance (Skodascher Schall) in pneumonia and pericardial effusion. Although the physical foundations of the theory of sound in Skoda's time were still little known, his detailing and acoustic refinement of sound phenomena represent a significant step forward compared to the vague descriptions of contemporary French clinicians. Seeing no particular benefit from the bloodletting, cupping glasses, and similar measures widely used in his time, he abandoned them, but fell into another extreme—therapeutic nihilism. To him belong the words: «We can recognize, describe, and understand a disease, but we must not even dream of the possibility of influencing it by any means.» Based on this, Skoda believed that all medical activity should be limited to making as accurate a diagnosis as possible, based on all physical research methods.