Sections were continued under the exclusive control of Dr. Woodward, an arrangement which, according to Otis's report of i July 1865, was to work with "entire harmony and concert of action" between the respective departments. This division of labor was not new, since during Brinton's curatorship, pathological work, as distinguished from the collection and preparation of specimens, had been largely assigned to Woodward. Like his associate, Brinton, Woodward was a Philadelphian, born in 1833, and a graduate in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1853. He was a founding member of the Pathological Society of Philadelphia, organized in 1857, and had published several papers dealing with microscopic studies before entering the Army at the outbreak of war. In connection with his duties at the Museum, he had written "The Hospital Steward's Manual," published in 1862, a valuable guide for the work of the forerunners of today's medical corpsmen, and "Outlines of the Chief Camp Diseases of the United States as Observed During the Present War," published in 1863. 25[1]
Pioneering in Microscopy
It was in the study of "camp fevers and diarrheas" that Dr. Woodward (fig. 13) made the pioneer use in America of the newly discovered aniline dyes in staining tissue, so that certain parts become more visible under the microscope. The idea of staining specimens so as to cause particular features to stand out more clearly was as old as Van Leeuwenhock himself, but the unstable nature and the limited range of colors of most of the vegetable and animal dyes available had limited the use of the idea until the discovery, by the English youth, William Henry Perkin, of aniline dyes made from coal tar. The new dye industry flourished famously in Germany and it was there, in 1862 and 1863, that the new colors were used to stain specimens for microscopic examination.
On 14 May, Dr. Woodward wrote to Rudolf Virchow, whose theory of the cellular origin of cellular tissues had been announced in 1858, asking if he had "used aniline or any of its derivatives for coloring microscopical specimens." There is no record of a reply from the great German investigator, if indeed he replied to his then virtually unknown American interrogator, but as early as July 1864, Woodward was using "aniline in histological researches," as reported in a paper in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, published in 1865 under the title "On the Use of Aniline in Histological Researches With a Method
- ↑ 25 (1) Hume, op. cit., pp. 141, 142. (2) Edmonds, Henry W.: Woodward and the Changing Concept of Cancer, 1858-1873. The Military Surgeon 109: 314, 315, October 1951.
