Spare a thought for Mary Papanicolaou. Her husband was George Papanicolaou. That's George looking down the microscope and Mary watching on. It was George Papanicolaou who invented the PAP smear and his first and very long term patient was Mary. George first started looking at PAP smears in the 1920's but it wasn't until the mid-1940's that it became more widely accepted as a useful investigation - that's a lot of PAP smears before anyone else started paying attention! George