Historical Background: The use of needles for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes dates back a long time [1], but the first true fine-needle cytology (FNC) was probably performed in 1904 by Greig and Gray [2], Marine officers who identified trypanosomes in lymph node (LN) smears. In 1912, Hirschfeld [3], a German haematologist, diagnosed cutaneous lymphomas and other tumours by FNC. Subsequently, in 1914, a "lymphoblasto-ma" was diagnosed by FNC on Romanowsky-stained smears [4]. Systematic studies on LN-FNC were then performed at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore [5] using 21-G needles and air-dried Romanowsky-stained smears, but Dudgeon and Patrick [6] were probably the first to define the FNC technique. In the 1920s, 2 research groups [7, 8] from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York worked independently on large FNC series from different organs, with LNs significantly represented. The study carried out by Martin and Ellis [8] also documents the initial distrust towards the diagnostic potentialities of FNC; in fact, James Ewing, chief of the Pathology Department of the MSKCC, disapproved the study because he believed the procedure increased the risk of spreading cancer cells, and prevented pathologists at his Department from participating in the study that was finally published by Martin, a surgeon, and Ellis, a technician [8]. Some years later, Stewart [9], who was the successor of Ewing, published the results of another FNC study performed on a large cohort of organs, including LNs. Other sporadic studies appeared in the literature over time, but FNC was "officially" accepted as a diagnostic tool only in the 1960s at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, where a group of talented and dedicated cytopa-thologists established an FNC cytopathology service (Fig. 1).
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