Modern pathology began to develop as a distinct field of inquiry during the 19th Century through natural philosophers and physicians that studied disease and the informal study of what they termed "pathological anatomy" or "morbid anatomy". By the 17th century, the study of rudimentary microscopy was underway and examination of tissues had led British Royal Society member Robert Hooke to coin the word " cell", setting the stage for later germ theory. Even so, growth in complex understanding of disease mostly languished until knowledge and experimentation again began to proliferate in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Baroque eras, following the resurgence of the empirical method at new centers of scholarship. Notably, many advances were made in the medieval era of Islam (see Medicine in medieval Islam), during which numerous texts of complex pathologies were developed, also based on the Greek tradition. The medical practices of the Romans and those of the Byzantines continued from these Greek roots, but, as with many areas of scientific inquiry, growth in understanding of medicine stagnated some after the Classical Era, but continued to slowly develop throughout numerous cultures. By the Hellenic period of ancient Greece, a concerted causal study of disease was underway (see Medicine in ancient Greece), with many notable early physicians (such as Hippocrates, for whom the modern Hippocratic Oath is named) having developed methods of diagnosis and prognosis for a number of diseases. Rudimentary understanding of many conditions was present in most early societies and is attested to in the records of the earliest historical societies, including those of the Middle East, India, and China. The study of pathology, including the detailed examination of the body, including dissection and inquiry into specific maladies, dates back to antiquity.
Here researchers at the Centers for Disease Control in 1978 examine cultures containing Legionella pneumophila, the pathogen responsible for Legionnaire's disease. The advent of the microscope was one of the major developments in the history of pathology. Pathology is a significant field in modern medical diagnosis and medical research. Further divisions in specialty exist on the basis of the involved sample types (comparing, for example, cytopathology, hematopathology, and histopathology), organs (as in renal pathology), and physiological systems ( oral pathology), as well as on the basis of the focus of the examination (as with forensic pathology). In common medical practice, general pathology is mostly concerned with analyzing known clinical abnormalities that are markers or precursors for both infectious and non-infectious disease, and is conducted by experts in one of two major specialties, anatomical pathology and clinical pathology.
A physician practicing pathology is called a pathologist.Īs a field of general inquiry and research, pathology addresses components of disease: cause, mechanisms of development ( pathogenesis), structural alterations of cells (morphologic changes), and the consequences of changes (clinical manifestations). Idiomatically, "a pathology" may also refer to the predicted or actual progression of particular diseases (as in the statement "the many different forms of cancer have diverse pathologies", in which case a more proper choice of word would be " pathophysiologies"), and the affix pathy is sometimes used to indicate a state of disease in cases of both physical ailment (as in cardiomyopathy) and psychological conditions (such as psychopathy). However, when used in the context of modern medical treatment, the term is often used in a narrower fashion to refer to processes and tests that fall within the contemporary medical field of "general pathology", an area which includes a number of distinct but inter-related medical specialties that diagnose disease, mostly through analysis of tissue and human cell samples. The word pathology also refers to the study of disease in general, incorporating a wide range of biology research fields and medical practices. Pathology is the study of the causes and effects of disease or injury.
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