Pathology studies disease’s causes, mechanisms, and tissue damage
Pathology means the study of disease—cause, pathogenesis, cell changes, and clinical effects. In hospitals the word often narrows to lab medicine reading tissues and fluids. The Latinized Greek name, from pathos and -logia, spread after the 1530s.
Societies dissected and speculated on maladies from antiquity, yet pathology as a formal specialty matured in the nineteenth century through “morbid anatomy” and natural philosophers. Rudolf Virchow’s microscopic tissue work accelerated modern understanding. Doctors who practise it are called pathologists, and the discipline underpins both modern diagnosis and medical research, most often by studying samples of tissue and cells.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s it was recognized as a medical specialty, then splintered with physiology into many subfields. In loose usage a disease's course is called its pathology, though pathophysiology is the sharper word, and the suffix -pathy marks illness of body or mind, from cardiomyopathy to psychopathy.
In everyday medicine, general pathology examines known abnormalities that signal or precede infectious and non-infectious disease, split between two main specialties, anatomical and clinical pathology. Narrower branches form around the sample (cytopathology, hematopathology, histopathology), the organ (renal), the body system (oral) or the purpose, as in forensic pathology.
The roots run deep. Early societies in the Middle East, India and China left records of many conditions, and by the Hellenic era Greek physicians such as Hippocrates were building methods of diagnosis and prognosis. Roman and Byzantine medicine inherited that tradition, and medieval Islamic scholars produced detailed texts on complex disorders. Progress then slowed until empirical inquiry revived in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. In the seventeenth century, early microscopy let Royal Society member Robert Hooke coin the word cell, preparing the ground for germ theory.
Source: Pathology
