The person behind the slide

I spent 25 years reading slides and teaching the doctors who would act on what we found. David Elkowitz's essay stopped me because he turns the slide around: the biopsy his students study is his own. He lets them see the science, then the fear, the waiting, and the person on the other side of the report. That is a lesson pathology needs to keep close. We can be precise about a specimen and still remember whose life is attached to it. Read his story in STAT.