[Histonet] The Passing Of Dr. James McCormick

[Bob Richmond]

>
>
> I used a cryostat, a large, very primitive cryostate (long fleece gloves)
> at Washington University in St. Louis in 1962, in a laboratory doing the
> quantitative histochemistry techniques developed by Dr. Oliver Lowry before
> then. We cut very thick sections, around 50 or 100 µm as I remember.


When I started my pathology residency at Johns Hopkins in 1964, we had the
early International cryostats, refrigerated rectangular boxes containing a
microtome. The old "wet knife" technique John Kiernan describes was
completely out of use at Hopkins, though it remained in widespread use by
surgical pathologists through the 1970s. I always refused to learn the
technique, because the pathologists I saw using it shot from the hip, often
calling cancer when it wasn't there. But I remember the old pathologists
cutting the sections, floating them off into an ice cream dish, picking
them up with a glass rod, staining them with Parker's blue-black ink,
slapping them onto a slide and coverslipping in water.

Bob Richmond
Maryville TN