Abstract
IN his very sympathetic obituary notice on W. H. Caldwell in NATURE of Nov. 8, p. 557, Dr. G. P. Bidder asks all biologists to remember that they owe to Caldwell the ribbon method of cutting paraffin sections. In this connexion I would like to direct attention to a short account of the invention of the microtome for cutting continuous ribbons of paraffin sections written by the late Sir Richard Threlfall, in Biological Reviews, 5, 357 (1930). Caldwell and Threlfall were contemporaries and friends at Caius; both were then scholars and later on fellows of the College. In a characteristically personal manner, Threlfall recounts in his article how when he was still an undergraduate he discussed with Caldwell their joint invention, and he tells the part that he himself played in making the new type of microtome which was to become an essential tool of zoologists. Threlfall's article includes a photograph of a copy of the original instrument; this copy is now in the Science Museum, London. The original instrument is in the Zoology Department, Cambridge.
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FOX, H. Origin of the Automatic Microtome. Nature 148, 727 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148727b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148727b0
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