Stokes, famous member of the Irish school of medicine, published the first systematic treatise on the use of the stethoscope – and this before his qualification at Edinburgh. His name is perpetuated in medical literature in connection with “Cheyne–Stokes respiration” and the “Stokes–Adams syndrome.”

Stokes, most prominent of the Irish school of medicine, established his reputation by his book on diseases of the chest. Important among its contents are his discovery of a stage of pneumonia prior to that described by Laennec as the first, his observations that contraction of the side has sometimes followed the cure of pneumonia and that paralysis of the intercostal muscles and diaphragm may result from pleurisy, and his employment of the stethoscope as an aid to the detection of foreign bodies in the air passages.

Stokes’s celebrated account of heart block with syncopal attacks – the Stokes–Adams syndrome (see also No. 2745). Stokes was most interested in the diagnostic value of this condition. The paper is reprinted in Med. Classics, 1939, 3, 727-38. For history of this syndrome see N. Flaxman, Bull. Inst. Hist. Med., 1937, 5, 115-30.

On pp. 320-27 is to be found Stokes’s account of fatty degeneration of the heart, in which he so well described the periodic form of respiration now known as “Cheyne–Stokes breathing.” Stokes also gave the first description of paroxysmal tachycardia (p. 161).