Cytology 01

The first four images in this set are designed to present some baseline information about the tissue staining used in most common histological preparations. Each image is of a thin section of spleen, prepared from the same block of material and photographed to show similar (albeit not identical) fields. When such biological material is viewed by conventional bright field microscopy (as here) without any staining, it is essentially featureless. This slide was weakly stained with toluidine blue which, under these conditions, simply reveals the kind of "mass-related" image that might be obtained by closing down the condenser aperture (to give "poor-man's" phase contrast). In the remaining three images of this series we show the effects, separately and then in combination, of staining with Hematoxylin and Eosin, which constitute the main components of conventional "H&E" staining.

Slide A-4, field 17-P of finder slide A, 16X objective