A half century ago at the beginning of my training in medicine, I spent many long hours with microscopes learning and memorizing the intricacies of bacilli, cells, and tissues. The microscope was part of the triad of foundational technology in medicine, composed of the microscope, the stethoscope, and the fountain pen. All played honored roles in my daily life. An old, abused instrument even enabled my diagnosis on a county hospital admitting ward of a rare case of Plasmodium ovale, a form of malaria only seen at that time from a small West African nation and completely unexpected in our facility. My senior physician, a fellow in Infectious Diseases, treated my diagnosis with open contempt until he placed his eye over the objective lens and saw what Galileo’s occhiolino had revealed within the patient’s red blood cells.
Many times since, when teaching and training young physicians, have I wished for a microscope on the wards so that my younger charges could see immediately and firsthand with what they might be dealing, rather than waiting hours or days for the official lab report. Not possible in “modern medicine”, given the requirements of billing for every service and certifying the quality and correctness of medical equipment and expertise of its users.
Decades later one of my senior partners tried to pass on this foundational tradition. His daughter had been admitted to medical school. He had saved his old medical school microscope for many years. In our day all students had to purchase their own in addition to using those of the medical school. Most of us eventually resold them to younger medical students, but he had preserved his looking forward to the day when he might have children and hopefully pass on his calling. He spent a sizeable sum having the instrument cleaned, refurbished, and calibrated. Proudly he presented it in its beautiful wooden case to his professional neophyte. She, having attended the medical school’s orientation, informed him that she didn’t understand the gift, as medical schools now used “perfect” images of all necessary materials on CD ROMs that the students could review ad nauseam on their personal computers. To this day, I do not know if his gift of tradition and hard-won scholarship returned to his closet or was sold on the secondary market. She has been in practice many years now and possibly still doesn’t recognize the values beyond simple utility that were represented and intended.
One of my grandsons does. He, our oldest grandchild, is on the cusp of adolescence, and, like his brother and sister, has benefited from excellent parenting and education by our daughter and son-in-law. Typically, he volunteered at the end of the current semester to help his teacher clean out closets and drawers in his long-lived school science lab. There he found buried a dusty wooden box containing a brass and wood microscope of mirrored vintage, still brassily bright. He immediately did his online research (he is a modern young person, after all) and identified it as made in Germany by a company called Ernst Leitrim Wetzlar. Then he established a rough value for the item on EBay. I prompted him to suggest to his teacher that the item be checked out and then used and displayed in the class alongside their more modern microscopes, so that students could learn about and experience the evolution of scientific investigational instruments. Sadly, he found his teacher(s) were much like my senior partner’s daughter. They felt they had no use for its brilliant simplicity. Happily, our grandson did recognize its true values, and had received permission to bring it home. There it may serve to educate and illuminate the broad world of the unseen for him and his siblings. And, through appreciation of its meanings from the past and into the present, even lead him or a sibling into a career in sciences or technology.
That appreciation of the meanings and values of the past and of history, through its tokens of technology, is these days a rare attribute for anyone, much less youngsters. Through that gift he will be well served in leading a fulfilled life enriched by his own curiosity. I could not be more proud.
Great story, my friend. My affection for my version of this symbol of our profession remains, years later. And, I remember that staff physician at The County whom you reference. I wish I could have been there when he realized that you had, indeed, discovered something remarkable as you worked up that patient.