Hospitals and Clinics
| Title | Hospitals and Clinics |
| View | Equipment, Outpatient Department Laboratory 2 |
| Series | II: Buildings and Grounds |
| Description | Technician Judy Weber with an Automatic Red Cell Counter. One of the most tedious jobs in the laboratory is that of counting blood cells. The usual procedure requires that a technician dilute blood in solutions in special pipettes and count each cell individually in a pre-determined volume. To achieve a fair degree of precision, two or three counts are made and in each one a technician actually enumerates between 450 and 600 red blood cells. The time required for this with a skilled technician is perhaps five minutes, and fatigue of the eyes limits the number of hours the technician can do such work to three or four per day. The automatic red cell counter will count a sample of 50,000 cells in about fifteen seconds, so that a triplicate count can be done in little more that a minute. The reliability of cell counts made with this machine is considerably better than those made with the microscope. Experiments are in progress to expand the use of the equipment so that white blood cell counts can also be done. In a large hospital like the University of Chicago Clinics, it is not unusual for 30 or 40 determinations of such things as blood sugar, blood urea nitrogen to be performed in the course of a working day along with several hundred other types of laboratory tests. |
| Subject Terms | Academic medical centers | Laboratories | Medical equipment | Blood--Analysis | Blood cell count--Equipment and supplies |
| Photographer | Lewellyn, Stephen |
| Photograph Date | 1958-04 |
| Physical Format | Photographic prints; 18.5 x 24.0 cm |
| Location | University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois |
| Collection | Archival Photographic Files |
| Repository | University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center |
| Image Identifier | apf2-03646 |
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