OF BLOOD AND PUS: Alfred Donné’s microscopic views of bodily fluids, published in the supplement to Cours de Microscopie in 1845, allowed for a clearer distinction between white blood cells and pus, which were often confused by Donné’s contemporaries. Such investigations provided a clue to the origins of leukemia as a disease. A) Red and white blood cells from a leukemic patient; B) and C) “mucous globules,” or white blood cells, from the same patient; D) mucous globules treated with acetic acid to visualize nuclei; E) recently secreted pus globules from a different patient; F) pus globules treated with acetic acid to visualize nuclei. COURTESY KIM KAMPENIn 1837, over the objections of skeptical colleagues, Alfred François Donné set up 20 microscopes at his own expense in the lecture hall of the Medical Faculty of Paris. There, he provided practical microscopy lessons to students. His goal was to make microscopy a standard part of medical practice, an aim he had already championed with the invention of a foldable pocket microscope.
When Louis Daguerre presented his brand-new photographic technique in 1839, Donné leapt at the chance to modify it to capture his microscopic images to spice up his lectures to ever-growing audiences. Donné’s adoption of such cutting-edge technology established him as a pioneer in the use of photographs—rather than hand-drawn sketches—to communicate scientific discoveries.
One of Donné’s students, John Hughes Bennett, only briefly attended the Frenchman’s microscopy course in 1841, but four years later would credit Donné’s enthusiasm for inspiring his own microscopic investigation of a patient with an enlarged spleen and liver. In the patient’s blood, Bennett found a large number of “colorless corpuscles,” or white blood cells. He named the disease leucocythemia, a condition we now know as leukemia.
A case describing leukemia-like symptoms ...
