This paper presents a historical review of the physical examination of the patient, going back first to the far Pleistocene where curiosity of primitive man could possibly explain the beginning of inspection or direct observation. Following this historical orientation, we then go to Egypt and its famous Papyri, Greece and Hipocrates, Galen and Roman medicine, because of the implications with clinical medicine. Included in this early background the beginning of medical percussion is mentioned in relation with Areteo of Capadoccia and John Plateario of Salerno in later years. The Renaissance and the Baroque periods prologue the important discoveries that evidenced in the XVIII century (Century of Enlighten) in relation with clinical examination of the patient. Corvisart, following basic orientations in Pathology given by Morgagni and Bichat, starts a basic semiology influenced by the organic lession. In this engagement a great help comes from the translation to french of Leopold Auenbrugger's famous Inventum Novum, one of the earliest mentions of immediate percussion. A brief mention is made of Bayle who, associated with Corvisart, are two of the formal precursors of immediate auscultation. In later years Laennec carne forward with his extraordinary discovery of mediate auscultation and Piorry with his pleximeter, introducing in this form mediate percussion. This is the beginning of the era of the physical sign in patient, in a methodology that is rapidly and universally accepted. At the end of the paper attention is called the physicians so that they give physical examination and anamnesis the highest importance and do not permit them to be supplanted by extra refined and specialized procedures increasingly more in use as diagnostic aids.