By Carol H. Blair, MT(ASCP)SC

Jeanette Rubin, MT(ASCP), is very proud of her low ASCP Board of Certification number—#10,779—and well she should be. Today, at the age of 84, she looks back with great satisfaction over a laboratory career that spanned more than 50 years.

She grew up in Peoria, Illinois, and graduated from high school in 1941. In assessing career opportunities at that time, she decided that she was not going to sit and pound a typewriter all day. Somewhere she read about a developing career field called medical technology, so she wrote to a hospital in Muncie, Indiana, and asked about this career opportunity. That hospital responded, giving her the information she needed to plan her training.

She attended college for two years—the second year of which was mostly chemistry—and then began the medical technology training program at St. Francis Hospital in Peoria. Rubin asserts that this program, taught by nuns who were medical technologists, “was one of the best training programs in the country.” At that time, histology training was included in medical technology (“We had to watch 40 autopsies!” Rubin recalls.), but later, her knowledge of histology would prove valuable to her. She graduated in 1944, receiving her ASCP certification at that time, and accepted a job in the hematology department of Methodist Hospital in Peoria. (St. Francis and Methodist Hospitals have since merged.) She became proficient at identifying abnormal cells, and the pathologist would often ask for her opinion.

In 1945 she moved to St. Louis and worked in a private laboratory, where she was the only technologist. Those were the days of Bunsen burners, Folin-Wu glucoses, NPNs, and other manual chemistries, “where we had to be so careful, because we were afraid the tubes would explode,” Rubin says with a chuckle. Newly married, she moved to Philadelphia in 1947 with her husband so he could attend optometry school. In her 19 years there, she worked in a hospital chemistry department and later in a physician’s office lab. In chemistry, Rubin says, “We used slide rules for our calculations.” She also took a few years off from the lab while her children were small.

In 1969, Rubin and her family moved back to St. Louis. The only job she could find was in the histology department of County Hospital, and she was then thankful for her multi-faceted training so many years before—and all those autopsies. She ended up working there for 23 years—until the hospital closed its doors. Job hunting once more in 1992, she saw an ad for a technologist in a private laboratory. Hired there, she recalls: “I worked in all areas again, but how things had changed in hematology and chemistry. Almost everything was automated.” She worked in that lab until 2002, when at the age of 78 she decided, reluctantly, to retire.

Today, Jeanette Rubin says to anyone who asks her about her life: “I always felt that I was helping people, and I was always proud to be a medical technologist, and especially of being able to say the words, ‘I am a registered medical technologist.’ My family was proud of me for being the first in the family to go to college, and for choosing a good profession.”

To young people today who are thinking about career choices, Rubin says about medical technology, “I can’t promise that you’ll get rich, but I can guarantee satisfaction.”

We medical technologists today, with our sophisticated instrumentation and advanced methodologies, recognize Jeanette Rubin and thousands of other laboratory professionals of yesteryear— technologists who knew only counting chambers, manual chemistries (some of which were toxic and/or volatile), and flame photometers. Those are the laboratory professionals who paved the way for us, and on whose shoulders we stand.

Ms. Blair is a medical technologist at Good Shepherd Medical Center, Longview, Texas.