I've switched to a Conan Doyle story. Talking about a retired doctor:
". The
Doctor still read from cover to cover his Lancet and
his Medical Journal, attended all professional
gatherings, worked himself into an alternate state of
exaltation and depression over the results of the
election of officers, and reserved for himself a den of
his own, in which before rows of little round bottles
full of glycerine, Canadian balsam, and staining agents,
he still cut sections with a microtome, and peeped
through his long, brass, old-fashioned microscope at the
arcana of nature. "
It seems unlikely than many members have ever seen a microtome. Pieces of tissue have to be carefully preserved, then dehydrated, and the water replaced with paraffin, which gives it enough firmness to be sliced by the superkeen blade in the microtome, the thickness of the slices being very accuratedly controlled. Then they can be mounted on glass slides, stained, and examined under a microscope. That was my job in an Army medical laboratory in Manila during WWII.