ABSTRACT
Joseph Jackson Lister helped transform the compound microscope from an unreliable device to a powerful instrument of investigation and furthered the development of its scientific uses. Microscopic examination of clinical material did not enter the mainstream of medical research and teaching until after the problem of spherical aberration in achromatic lenses had been corrected in 1827. In 1896, citing the best hospitals on the Continent and at other locations in Great Britain, the medical and surgical officers of London's St. Thomas's Hospital appealed to the administrators for a centralized clinical laboratory for scientific investigation of diseases of patients in the hospital. Laboratory facilities of one sort or another were already part of the hospital scene in the United States. In 1890 almost the only laboratory work entrusted to the house staff at New York Hospital was the routine analysis of the urine and an occasional hemoglobin test.
