(C15-19) Slide 110: Palmar Skin and Slide 193: Monkey finger

Slide 110 (C15) shows another example of adult thick skin. Examine the thick stratum corneum, the other layers of the epidermis, the dermis and the hypodermis. An outstanding feature of this slide is the sweat gland ducts. Note how the sweat gland ducts wind their way up from the secretory portion of the glands buried deep in the dermis through the dermis and epidermis to the surface of the skin.

A low-power view of Slide 193, the monkey finger, is shown in C16. The details of this slide are similar to the preceding one. Note the features of the junction between the dermis and hypodermis. Examine the dermal papillae for Meissner's corpuscles (C17). The fastest way to locate Meissner's corpuscles is to scan the slide with the intermediate objective looking for a column of cells with dark, flattened nuclei that lie perpendicular to the long axis of the column. Some slides do not have any corpuscles, so please borrow one that does. The secretory portions of the sweat glands in this slide show myoepithelial cells very clearly (C18). There are also Pacinian corpuscles (C19) in the hypodermis (the light-colored swirls on the right side of C19). Pacinian corpuscles are easily found at low magnification. Q14 What is the function of Meissner's corpuscle?