ACCIDENTAL MEDICINE

MEDICAL breakthroughs discovered by accident. This week: Smear tests GEORGE PAPANICOLAOU, a Greek-born doctor who moved to the U.S. in 1913, was studying guinea pigs and wanted to test his theory that you could tell where a female mammal was in its reproductive cycle by analysing vaginal fluid.

In the early Twenties, he shifted his focus from guinea pigs to humans and happened to receive a sample of a woman with uterine cancer.

Dr Papanicolaou was amazed to find that the abnormal cancer cells could easily be seen under a microscope.

‘The first observation of cancer cells in the smear of the uterine cervix gave me one of the greatest thrills I ever experienced during my scientific career,’ he wrote of his discovery. When the smear test was introduced in the Forties, cervical cancer was the number one killer of women.

Nowadays, the smear test is a standard cancer screening for women and has vastly reduced the death rate worldwide.

Dr Papanicolaou’s name lives on via his smear test, thanks to his old nickname — Dr Pap.