[Histonet] Coffee at the desk

[John Kiernan]

Bob, Why weren't they routinely buffering (or at least neutralizing) the formalin fixatives at Johns Hopkins as recently as 1970?

It had all been in the scholarly books (by Pearse, Lillie, etc) for >10 years, and was also in Lee Luna's 1968 Manual of Histologic Staining Methods, published by the USA's Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

I was brung up on cold neutral buffered formalin for enzyme activity histochemistry when I was a medical student doing an interpolated research year in the early 1960s.


Cheers,  John

John Kiernan (London, Canada)

= = =

________________________________
From: Bob Richmond via Histonet <histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu>
Sent: June 3, 2023 8:25 AM
To: Histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu <histonet at lists.utsouthwestern.edu>
Subject: Re: [Histonet] Coffee at the desk

This 84 year old pathologist recalls the histopathology laboratory at Johns
Hopkins Hospital around 1970, when I was a pathology resident there.

Histotechs, often laboratory clerks, sat in front of rows of 400 mL Stender
dishes, smoking cigarettes while they hand-stained slides, often carrying
out the entire procedure from xylene and descending alcohols, up to final
coverslipping.

It wasn't the xylene that worried me, so much as the dish full of a 20%
solution of picric acid in acetone, that removed most of the copious
formalin pigment (since buffering the formalin wasn't permitted).

I spoke to the chief histotechnologist about the issue. He responded by
stubbing out a lighted cigarette into one of the Stender dishes of xylene.
(I'm told you can also do that with gasoline, but not with acetone.)

He was never incinerated, but he died of smoking-related disease soon after
his retirement.

Bob Richmond
Maryville TN
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