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His bookshelves hold copies of “Principles and Practice of Surgical Pathology and Cytopathology,” alongside Tupperware containers and glass jars containing embalmed human organs.

Yolanda Oertel, 82, a physician at Washington Hospital Center and a professor at George Washington University’s medical school who specialized in cytopathology, died Sept. 16 at a hospice center in Falls Church, Va. The cause was a stroke, said a friend, Wen Lee.

She was on the GWU faculty from 1968 to 2002 and then spent the next 13 years as a physician specializing in cytopathology — cellular disease — at Washington Hospital Center.

Cytopathology refers to the diagnosis of disease at the cellular level.

The first cytopathology tool widely used in the United States was the Pap smear test, which was adopted in the 1950s to screen patients for cervical cancer.