Disclosed herein is a lighting apparatus using one or more fluorescent lamps. A solid image pickup element and an optical lens held in a casing are disposed on the flexible printed circuit board. In the case of tissue acquisition instruments, the inventors have discovered significant advantages for securely affixing the distal end of the tissue acquisition instrument to a particular tissue target area. The fan controller also includes a memory device, such as an electrically erasable programmable read only memory, coupled to the processor, that contains the desired speed setting of the variable speed fan.