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I spend most of my Mondays with blood. I am a hematologist by training. I study blood and treat blood diseases, including cancers and precancers of white blood cells. On Monday, I arrive much earlier than my patients, when the morning light is still aslant across the black slate of the lab benches. I close the shutters and peer through the microscope at blood smears. A droplet of blood has been spread across a glass slide, to make a film of single cells, each stained with special dyes. The slides are like previews of books, or movie trailers. The cells will begin to reveal the stories of the patients even before I see them in person. I sit by the microscope in the darkened room, a notepad by my side, and whisper to myself as I go through the slides. It’s an old habit; a passerby might well consider me unhinged. Each time I examine a slide, I mumble out the method that my hematology professor in medical school, a tall man with a perpetually leaking pen in his pocket, taught me: “Divide the main cellular components of blood. Red cell. White cell. Platelet. Examine each cell type separately. Write what you observe about each type. Move methodically. Number, color, morphology, shape, size.” It is, by far, the favorite time of my day at work. Number, color, morphology, shape, size. I move methodically. I love looking at cells, in the way that a gardener loves looking at plants—not just the whole but also the parts within the parts: the leaves, the fronds, the precise smell of loam around a fern, the way the woodpecker has bored into the high branches of a tree. Blood speaks to me—but only if I pay attention.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human)