Romanowsky-Malachowski Stains the So-Called Romanowsky Stain: Malachowski's 1891 Use of Alkali Polychromed Methylene Blue for Malaria Plasmodia

In the course of revising the chapter on neutral stains for the 9th edition of Conn's Biological Stains (1977) two papers of Kingsley (1935, 1937) were encountered. The first seemed to be a rather minor revision of MacNeal's tetrachrome stain, the second was concerned mainly with the inclusion of acetone in the solvent. Kingsley in this 1937 paper made an extensive review of the literature and made the only post-Nocht reference to Malachowski's 1891 publication that we had seen. It was not until much later when we were able to obtain a copy of Malachowski's 1891 paper and to study it in detail that we realized that not only had Malachowski published his results slightly before Romanowsky's 1891 paper, but that he had also anticipated Nocht's (1898) discovery of the use of alkali polychromed methylene blue.