Short answers, pulled from the story.
Abulcasis performed the earliest recorded biopsy in the 11th century by using a needle to puncture a patient's thyroid gland. He also wrote extensively on surgical techniques that were translated into Latin in the 12th century by Geradus Cremonensis.
The term biopsy was coined in 1879 by French dermatologist Ernest Besnier. The word is a fusion of two Greek roots meaning life and to see or examine.
A pathologist fixes the tissue to preserve its structure and then dehydrates and embeds it in a block of paraffin wax. The pathologist uses a microtome to slice the sample into extremely thin sections which are mounted on glass slides and stained with dyes to highlight cellular details.
Clear margins or negative margins indicate that no disease was found at the edges of the removed tissue. Positive margins mean that disease was detected at the edges often necessitating a wider excision to ensure complete eradication.
Studies have shown that liquid biopsies can detect cancer DNA in the blood of more than 80 percent of patients with metastatic cancers. These tests analyze fragments of tumor-cell DNA continuously shed into the bloodstream.