Set of slides purchased on eBay

[neal Shields]

"Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get"

I purchased a set of pathology slides on eBay and probably overpaid but pathology slides are expensive as opposed to healthy tissue.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/196001110 ... ed-public/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/196001110 ... ed-public/

The seller said he thought that they were from 1938 because that was the date on the description list. (they weren't)

I prefer old slides as I have found that older slides, from medical sources, tend to be much better than modern slides from the big houses.

This is my opinion is because they do a better job of slicing them thinner.

Modern histology slides are like trying to read a book that is printed on tissue paper and you are trying to read three pages at the same time with the pages lit from the back. You can make out some of the letters but the words not so much. Modern medical slides tend to have sections that are several cells thick where old ones are as little as one cell thick.

These slides are a set of student exam slides which are numbered not labeled. The student is expected to look at the slide under the microscope and identify the tissue (Liver, lung, kidney, heart etc.) AND the particular disease. Not so easy.

Once you get hooked on medical slides they can be a lot of fun. If you study the slide and then find videos on youtube you will find that they are very different from each other. You can type in the name of the disease and "pathology and you will get a whole list of people eager to explain to you what you are seeing.

This set is from Guy's College London which is the medical school that is part of King's College.

Now for the reason I know they are not from 1938.

The slides have the tissue embedded in resin, not paraffin. That process wasn't invented until 1949

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/ ... 83_A1b.pdf

It turns out that it was invented so they could cut sections thin enough for electron microscopes.

As the hospital was part of Kings i suspect they started using the new technique very early on. So the slides are still probably from the early 50s.

In general they are very functional and give a very good image after 75 years or so. A few have some microscopic bubbles under the cover slip and more have what looks like tiny cracks. Both the bubbles and cracks are far enough away from the tissue sample that they mostly disappear when you focus in on the tissue.

However, not under phase. See the following example:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/196001110 ... ed-public/

this is the same image with normal lighting:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/196001110 ... ed-public/

This is an example of another slide that is representative of most of them:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/196001110 ... ed-public/

It is at 400x and you can see quite a bit of detail in the cell nucleus.

Overall I am very pleased as I think I now own an important part of microscopy history: some of the first slides ever to use resin embedding.

One downside with these and all resin embedded slides I have is that it make DIC almost useless.

Some of the descriptions:
Milary T.B. Liver
Syphilitic Liver
Sago Spleen
Oat Celled Carcinoma
Typhoid Ulcer

It seems that the first half of the 20th Century wasn't a very healthy place.

[AntoniScott]

I bought a set of patholgy slides from China on EBay that are all excellent. Superb Hematoxylin and Eosin staining. They were not cheap. I compared them to slides made by a Histology lab that is an adjunct to our local hospital and they were even better.