By Chelsea Conaboy, Globe Staff

In 1819, French physician Ren Laennec published a description of the cacophony of sick lungs, deciphered with his new invention: the stethoscope. Some 18 months later, doctors in New England read about his discoveries, delivered across the sea and by horseback to their offices in one of the early editions of what would become the venerable New England Journal of Medicine.

Laennecs discoveries altered the practice of medicine in a way so fundamental that we see the effects each time our doctor listens to the sounds in our chest. Its among the first of many enduring changes in medicine that were documented by the journal and are being celebrated this year as the publication reaches its 200th anniversary.

Illustration from Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart and Lungs, by John C. Warren, April 1, 1812, issue of the journal. (Photo courtesy New England Journal of Medicine.)

The journal, now operated by the Massachusetts Medical Society, is marking the occasion with a special website, a series of articles, and a symposium in June meant to highlight how far the field of medicine has come in two centuries.

This is an opportunity to take a look and see how much better off we are now than our forbearers, said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor in chief.

The commemorative website includes an interactive timeline of the milestones in medicine that have appeared on the journals pages. For a selection, see this story by the Associated Press.

The manner in which the journal has reported on such advancements is a story in itself.

When Robert Koch gave a famous lecture in Berlin in 1882 identifying the bacteria that caused tuberculosis, the news was dispatched to the journal via telegraph and printed a week later, Drazen said.

Nearly a century later, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out its weekly bulletin reporting on four previously healthy homosexual men who had contracted an unknown infection -- what would become known as HIV -- the news reached editor Arnold Bud Relman by phone and the first articles on the disease appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine soon after, Drazen said.

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Happy birthday, New England Journal of Medicine!