Arthur Purdy Stout and his times. With a history of the Laboratory of Surgical Pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.

To establish the chronology of the onset and evolution of the specialty that we now call surgical pathology, it is necessary to remember that the same term was used in Europe, beginning in the second half of the 19th century, to refer to the systematic teaching by university surgeons of the nature, diagnosis, and treatment of surgical dis­ eases (figs. 4-1, 4-2). There were clinical depart­ ments, institutes, and chairs of surgical pathology. Some departments of surgery at universities had their own laboratories equipped for histology, blood counts, and bacteriology. These were used by young surgeons to conduct projects in experimental surgery, and were also often employed for the his­ tological diagnosis of routine human surgical spec­ imens. This was a result of the need felt by the surgery chairman to assert the complete indepen­ dence of his department from faculty members of other departments, and the well-known lack of inter­ est on the part of the then professors of pathology (referred to by Dr. George Humphreys as the follow­ ers of ''the stiff necked Germanic Pathology of Vir­ chow" [10]) to do anything less than a complete autopsy. These small research and diagnostic labo­ ratories, incorporated in clinical departments of sur­ gery, were the seeds around which the modem spe­ cialty of surgical pathology would later crystallize. The beginning of the 20th century had witnessed the rapid development of what was to become the era of modern surgery. This was triggered by the discoveries of Pasteur and Lister, which led to the understanding of the nature and mechanism of infections and the possible methods of preventing and controlling them (asepsis and antisepsis). This, together with the progress of anesthesia and the beginning of the understanding of the physiological changes in the surgical patient, made it possible for the surgeon to start undertaking elective operations rather than limiting surgery to emergencies (trauma, perforations of viscera, abscesses, etc.). It was in this atmosphere that, out of necessity, the specialty that we now call surgical pathology was born. The surgeons wanted to know the nature of the lesions (tumors, granulomas, etc.) that they removed or biopsied in their patients but the pathologists of the old school, influenced by the famous European professors from Germany and Austria, showed little