Trachea

[Olympusman]

Slide from the set from the Ireland Army Hospital Fort Knox Kentucky labeled "Trachea (elastic)"

[Pau]

IMO it doesn't show the trachea but the esophagus or maybe a big arteria.
Look at the same slide, likely you'll find the trachea as a round structure with a ring of cartilage. Both organs are very close in the neck.

[Olympusman]

The slide from the Ireland Army Hospitaol at Fort Knox Kentucky is labeled as Trachea (elastic(

Mike

[Pau]

Sure, but the histology doesn't match. I guess the trachea will also be present in the slide and so the label.

The staining technique is not very typical.
At the structure pictured I can see a big ring of smooth muscle and a folded epithelium, typical of the esophagus or arteria (more detail and info about magnification will be needed), no traces of cartilague, take a look:
http://www.apsubiology.org/anatomy/2020 ... y_Tree.htm

The tracheal cartilague prevents trachea for collapsing and so is a most typical part.

[Olympusman]

Not surprising. I think at the mid-60s many of the medical technicians at US Army hospitals were rapidly trained medical technicians who were also draftees, so their attention to detail may have been indifferent. When I was in the Army in the late 1960s to early 70s, when you went on sick call you would recieve a generous prescripction for Darvon (Codeine) as a matter of fact for anything from a head cold to gonnorhea. Medical technicians and medics were typically pacifist draftees. They were never stigmatized in my experience.

Miike

[yvan_be]

It's an artery allright, stained with elastic-Van Gieson staining technique.

The picture shows the arterie's inner layer of elastic fibers, stained dark-brown by orcein, surrounded by a thick layer of smooth muscle, stained yellow by the picric acid in Van Gieson's stain. Collagen is stained red by acid fuchsin, the other ingredient in Van Gieson's staining solution.

Yellow and red have faded somewhat, not uncommon in slides stained with Van Gieson's.

A cross section of trachea should have shown the very caracteristic cartillage rings supporting the trachea (in routine slides usualy somewhat wrinkeled as sections containing cartillage are difficult to stretch), the inner epithelial lining of it, as well as associated lymph nodes and blood vessels.

For compairisson: Sorry, poor pictures. Medium and high power view of a small artery (rabbit, Bouin, 5µm, H&E).
H&E isn't the first choice to stain connective tissue, but in the high power view, the connective tissue inner layer (mostly elastin) can be seen.

Notice the difference in appearance of the nuclei: the darker stained and more dense shaped ones are those of a unicellular inner epithelial layer in the arterie. The more elongated and lighter stained ones are the nuclei of the smooth muscle.