Section-Cutting. A Practical Guide to the Preparation and Mounting of Sections for the microscope, special prominence being given to the subject of animal sections

Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1879. First American edition.

1879 ENGLISH SURGEON AUTHORED THIS FIRST BOOK DEVOTED TO SECTION-CUTTING OF SPECIMENS FOR MICROSCOPIC STUDY BY A SCOTTISH SURGEON.

6 1/2 inches tall slim hardcover, publisher's dark green cloth binding, blindstamped rulings to covers, gilt title to cover and spine, viii, 90 pp with 11 blank leaves bound in between pages 87 and 89 (noted in other copies, and presumably intended for readers' notes). Covers clean and bright, binding tight, pages crisp and unmarked, very good+.

SYLVESTER MARSH (1845-1890) was a surgeon, and a semi-professional microscopist. He produced high-quality microscope slides, in particular paired stained sections of human liver from healthy and alcoholic individuals (Figures 1-3). He also prepared and distributed other histological specimens, and sectioned botanical objects. In 1878, he published in London a small book (1st American in 1879, offered here) on how to prepare and cut thin sections of tissues for microscopical investigation. This was evidently a good seller, and a second edition was issued in 1882 that was twice the size and included several professional lithographs. He graduated from medical school in Edinburgh and obtained a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians from Edinburgh, and a Licentiate of the Faculty of the Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. The second edition of Marsh's book was published in 1882, containing 156 pages (Figure 5). He notes in the preface that an unauthorized copy of his first edition had complicated sales in the USA, "the appearance in America - within three months after the publication of the work here - of a piratical reprint, which of necessity effectually stopped sale of the English edition in that country". Indeed, I found two different US editions of Marsh's first edition, one published by Lindsay & Blakiston, Philadelphia, and the other by The Industrial Publication Co., New York. The New York version described itself as "reprinted from the London edition", and included an appendix on cutting tools not found in any other edition, and so is probably the pirated version. In his Preface, Marsh claims this volume to be the first entirely devoted to section-cutting. Illustrations show a simple tube -and-screw microtome with a manual straight razor serving as the knife. Sections were then mounted on "sliders," (pieces of ivory or bone containing specimens held between disks of transparent mica) until the Royal Microscopical Society introduced the standardized glass microscope slide.