Routine and Special Staining in Cytology

The title of this necessarily brief overview implies that there might be a difference in principle between stains which are routinely applied for “general” diagnostic purposes on the one hand and those which serve in the recognition of selected components of cells and tissues on the other. It is expected that routine stains are technically simple — sometimes they are — and furthermore, that their theoretical background be equally simple — but the theory underlying biological staining is far from being simple. As a point of fact, a general theory of staining does not exist (Horobin 1977). It is also expected that special staining differs from routine staining by its high level of sophistication. In the passages to follow we shall comment on these assumptions.