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quickly nixed several possible specialties. “Day one I knew I wasn’t
cut out for surgery. I thought I’d be attracted to pediatrics but no.
As soon as I saw my first slide, it was evident to me that was what
I cared about,” he said.
Dr. Martin began his residency in pathology at Louisville General
Hospital. A standard pathology rotation was four years with two
devoted to tissue study (anatomic pathology) and two devoted to
laboratory involvement (clinical pathology). Here he found his muse.
“It was in my second year of residency,” Dr. Martin recalled. “I
looked at a peripheral blood smear and could see there were two
red cell populations, a small and a large. I thought, ‘I bet this patient
has refractory anemia.’ Lo and behold, that’s just what they had. It
was the first time I could actually look at a slide and process it like
a pathologist could. It just happened to be a blood smear, so that
led me to hematopathology (diseases of the blood, bone marrow,
lymph nodes, etc.)”
Realizing he had an eye for heme-path, Dr. Martin looked around
at his competition.
“I quickly discovered this was not something many other pathologists had in Louisville at the time. I was going to have to go
elsewhere to get more training.” Encouraged by a mentor at the VA,
Dr. Martin accepted a hematopathology fellowship at the Mallory
Institute of Pathology in Boston in 1986.
Although his knowledge of hematopathology was expanded by his
time there, Dr. Martin couldn’t truly call Boston home. “A week after
we were there, our oldest son said to us, ‘Are we still in the United
States?’ We thought that was quite telling. It’s a wonderful place to
train and visit but I could not wait to come back to civilization here
in the south.” It didn’t take long before they did just that, returning
two years later in 1988.
Dr. Martin began working part time at both the VA Hospital and
the University of Louisville Hospital, where he and Dr. Davis would
serve as faculty. When the James Graham Brown Center needed a
hematopathologist, Dr. Martin answered the call and was able to
open the area’s first flow cytometry lab.
“The flow cytometer is an instrument which utilizes a laser beam.
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You take cells in a suspension, steam them with antibodies that have
different colored fluorochromes on them and you can characterize
the cells by the different proteins expressed on them,” Dr. Martin
explained. “You can’t see it with the naked eye. But, when you run
the cells through the flow cytometer and they’re interrogated by the
laser beam, they flash light off that is recorded by the flow cytometer
which determines whether proteins are present or not. We’re letting
the laser be our eyes, allowing us to characterize lymphomas and
leukemias quite accurately.”
After 24 years working in U of L’s flow cytometry lab, Dr. Martin
accepted an offer from Norton Healthcare in 2009 and opened his
current