Abstract
The first schools of cytotechnology in the world were established in America in 1947 in New York and Hartford, Connecticut. The American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) certified Rosalyn S. Yaskin Abrams as the first cytotechnologist in 1957. In 1960, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare began paying stipends of $225.00 per month for up to 12 months to encourage enrollment of cytotechnology students. That amount is about $20,000 per year in 2012 dollars. The number of cytotechnology schools reached a peak of about 130 in the early 1970s, and today, the number is about 32. As of June 2011, ASCP reports that 15,224 cytotechnologists have been certified. As of 2009, the latest year as of this writing for which CMS has provided data, 6,064 cytotechnologists screen Pap smears. As the outgoing president of the American Society of Cytopathology in 1996, Prabodh Gupta, declared, “the Pap test is cytopathology.”1 Cytotechnology: The First Half-Century, a 3-part series by Florence W. Patten, is available online.2–4
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Gill, G.W. (2013). Screening. In: Cytopreparation. Essentials in Cytopathology, vol 12. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4933-1_20
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