ROMANOWSKY STAINS OR MALACHOWSKI STAINS???

This post is in continuation with my previous post on Romanowsky stains.

In the previous post on ‘Romanowsky stain and Dmitri Leonidovich Romanowsky’, I talked about three people, Ehrlich, Chenzinsky and Romanowsky who worked on this staining methods.

This post is about yet another important person, who has independently produced the same stain combination as Romanowsky and even earlier than him, however his work was ignored.

And he is Ernst Malachowski.

 

                                                                       Ernst Malachowski

Ernst Malachowski was born on March 12, 1857 in Poland. He went to grammar school from 1867 to 1876 in Posen, Prussia (now Poland) at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium. Then, he moved to Germany, where he studied medicine at the University of Breslaw from 1876 to 1881. He had good respect in political as well as medical circles. He was appointed as the Assistenzarzt fur innere Krankheiten (Assistant Doctor in Internal Medicine), at Kranken-Hospital zu Allerheiligen (All Saints Hospital) in Breslaw, Germany. During this time, All Saints Hospital was the second largest hospital in Germany. Later he entered private practice in Breslaw, where he was also engaged in laboratory investigations.

Now we will see, what significant contributions he made to the blood stain.

Till that time, no one had seen the nucleus of plasmodial cell, because the stains those days did not differentiate the nucleus and cytoplasm. Also, the blood cells stained red or some variations of blue. However, the subtle variations of purple colour did not exist.

Malachowski was the first person to produce the royal colour, purple by modifying the methylene blue component of the stain. In 1889,he made a stain preparation, in which he noted differential staining of the plasmodial nucleus, but he was dissatisfied as he could not repeat the effect.

He tried again, first he acidified the methylene blue but it did not improve the staining quality. Then he tried alkalinizing the methylene blue with borax, which yielded the desired result consistently. The differential staining of the plasmodial nucleus and the appearance of the desired purple colour in other blood components was seen with alkalinization of methylene blue. This later was termed as “polychromatophilic effect”. The alteration to methylene blue that produced this effect was later known as “polychroming”.

He stated that the staining took 24 hours but he was sure that the results were easily reproducible. He gave the first public demonstration of the new stain on June 15,1890. Till this point, no blood stain differentiated the nucleus from the cytoplasm in the malarial organism. Also, the chromatin of the plasmodial nucleus was clearly visible. In an 1890 paper, he described his public demonstration and reported that this stain was effective. In a short article, in August 1891, he described the technique of staining, to get the desired results as mentioned in his earlier paper. He also mentioned how to alkalinize the methylene blue component with borax.  

For reasons unknown, nobody repeated Malachowski’s deliberate polychroming of methylene blue until 1898, when Nocht restated the notion that this modification was necessary for production of desired blue purple colour.

Romanowsky published his technique for producing the desired purple colour in September 1891, which was after a year after Malachowski first demonstrated it. Unfortunately, Malachowski’s most important discovery on blood staining was ignored and  he never wrote another article on the same. Somehow, the credits for the discovery of this magical purple colour has been attributed erroneously to Dimitri Romanowsky.

Malachowski demonstrated the purple colour in June 1890, well before Romanowsky. Also, Malachowski’s method was deliberate, scientific and reproducible unlike Romanowsky’s method which was accidental and not reproducible. Ralph Lillie, eminent histochemist and pathologist,  wrote in 1978,

“ Perhaps we should refer to this family of stains as Malachowski stains? He did introduce deliberate alkali polychroming of methylene blue-eosin blood stains.All- Plehn’s, Malachowski’s, Romanowsky’s, Gautier’s, Ziemann’s and Nochts’ – were basically variants of Chenzinsky’s stain, in some of which polychromimg of the methylene blue was accidentally found or deliberately produced.”

Despite the serendipitous nature of his results and their irreproducibility, Romanowsky’s name got attached to the stain. He was lucky. And this also answers my question in the previous post. Did Romanowsky really knew that polychromed methylene blue might produce this effect or was it a serendipity?

It was Malachowski bad luck, that his work got ignored.

In addition to his papers on blood staining, Malachowski published papers on both clinical and therapeutic aspects of neurology, the speech centers of the brain, their disorders and their symptoms. He was considered a straightforward and precise thinker and speaker.

In 1909, he received the title ‘Sanit a tsrat’ from the German Emperor Wilhelm II. This honour was rarely given to medical doctors who had practiced for atleast 20 years and had made exceptional contributions to medical field.

He died on March7, 1934.

This is yet another eponymous debate like ‘Auer rods or Mc Crae rods’.

Malachowski or Romanowsky stains?

I was atleast aware of “Auer rods or Mc Crae rods” debate even since my MD days.

But really, I did not even know there was someone by name Malachowski, who had done such significant contributions to our everyday used stains in our lab.  

Please post your comments what do you think about Malachowski or Romanowsky stains?

 

References:

1.     KP Krafts, E Hempelmann and BJ Oleksyn. The color purple: from royalty to laboratory, with apologies to Malachowski. Biotechnic & Histochemistry 2011, 86(1): 7–35.

 

                                                                                 Written by Dr.Priyavadhana B