Day 26

# 80 HISTOPATHOLOGY Histopathology is the diagnostic backbone of surgical oncology. Every specimen you send from theatre passes through the same pipeline: fixation, processing, sectioning, staining, microscopy and, increasingly, immunohistochemistry. MRCS Part A questions rarely ask you to be a pathologist — they ask whether you understand the pipeline well enough to

# 82 BIOPSY Biopsy is the removal of tissue from a living patient to establish a diagnosis. In MRCS Part A, the examiners do not ask you to define it — they ask you to pick the right biopsy for the right lesion. Every wrong choice on the exam (and in clinical

# 81 GRAFTS A graft is living tissue moved from one site to another and left to acquire a new blood supply from the recipient bed. A flap differs in that it carries its own vascular pedicle. MRCS Part A focuses on the vocabulary, the biology of graft "take"