Laboratory

“Laboratory development during the nineteenth century can be thought of as a chain of links that began with the laboratory devoted to basic research; was followed by the clinical laboratory, which split its efforts between research and patient care; and ended with the ward laboratory, the workshop next to the patient, where the knowledge and methods perfected in the other laboratories were most practically applied. . . . The first [publicly financed] laboratories opened were mainly devoted to detecting diphtheria. . . . In 1893, New York City founded the first laboratory devoted to diphtheria diagnosis” (Reiser, 140-142).