A retrospective of lung morphometry: from 1963 to present.

THE PUBLICATION, fifty years ago, of my little monograph “Morphometry of the Human Lung” (30) summarized the results of a most unusual four years of work by an anatomist in the fascinating environment of the Cardiopulmonary Laboratory headed by the Nobel laureates André F. Cournand and Dickinson W. Richards at Columbia University Division of Bellevue Hospital in New York, the Mecca of cardiopulmonary physiology of the time. While I was on a postdoc fellowship in pathology at Yale University Cournand had invited me to join his group with the mandate to “do anything on the structure of the lung that is of interest to physiology,” an extraordinary challenge for a young Swiss anatomist. I cut short my fellowship and moved to New York, setting up a microscopy lab in a room next door to the installations where cardiac catheters were shoved to obtain physiological information on the pulmonary circulation.