Word: specimen
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...Main Street. They were women who did not appear ill, but wore a worried look. Many of them slipped in furtively. The doctor was kindness personified. If, after listening to a woman's story, he thought it likely that she was pregnant, he would send a urine specimen to City Hospital for a pregnancy test. If the test proved positive, and the patient insisted that her whole life would come crashing down about her if she had a baby, Dr. Knapp performed an abortion. Beginning in 1934, he did 200 to 300 a year, at $200 apiece-which works...
...Noon, for example, conveys a strong sense of light and dark skies and of lilting movement. Looking at it is rather like watching a snowstorm through a windowpane and remembering Thomas Nash's line: "Brightness falls from the air." Jackson Pollock's Scent is a heady specimen of what one worshiper calls his "personalized skywriting." More the product of brushwork than of Pollock's famed drip technique, it nevertheless aims to remind the observer of nothing except previous Pollocks, and quite succeeds in that modest design. All it says, in effect, is that Jack the Dripper...
Despite the "wonder drugs," which kill specific kinds of germs, physicians are still handicapped in starting treatment because in many cases they do not know what kind of germ they are fighting. Hence, they do not know which drug to use. If they take a specimen from a patient, e.g., sputum, spinal fluid, they can grow the bacteria from it and eventually identify them, but this takes about a week. In Atlanta, Bacteriologist Max D. Moody of the U.S. Public Health Service described a method for achieving this result within an hour...
First, a drop of the specimen fluid is smeared on a microscope slide. Then it is covered with a drop of serum (from an animal) containing the antibody which develops when the suspected species of bacteria is present. This serum is tagged with fluorescein, a luminous substance. If the right antibody hits the right germ, the germ starts to glow under the microscope. If the tester has guessed wrong, no glow, and he tries again with other antibodies...
...dinner given by Britain's Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1927, the college's president, Sir Berkeley Moynihan, took aside France's Professor René Leriche to show him a unique and little-known specimen. It was a sealed glass tube containing a piece of small intestine with a hole in it. Surgeon Leriche made an on-the-spot diagnosis: perforation caused by a tropical disease. Confided Moynihan proudly: "It is Napoleon's intestine...