Pathologist

A pathologist is a medical doctor who is involved in pathology, the study and diagnosis of disease through the examination of molecules, cells, tissues, and organs. Although this covers a wide field, much of it is involved in the study of blood and other body fluids, and tissues.

To train as a pathologist, doctors need to have completed a four-year medical degree, four years of medical school training, and between three to four years of postgraduate training. This may involve the study of anatomic pathology or clinical pathology, each of which requires certification by the American Board of Pathology. Many also tend to be osteopaths. In Britain, pathologists must have completed the undergraduate degree and then train in courses that have been approved by the Royal College of Pathologists, founded in 1962, involving training attachment, and also a series of examinations.

Famous pathologists include the Scotsman Matthew Baillie who wrote Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body (1763); the French surgeon Guillaume, Baron Dupuytren who developed the surgical procedures for alleviating what became Dupuytren's contracture; the German pathologist and politician Rudolf Virchow who was involved in pioneering work on cancer; the Briton, Sir Jonathan Hutchinson who was a pioneer in the [Page 1344]study of congenital syphilis; the German pathologist Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen who worked on the degeneration of the skeleton; the Dane, Johannes Fibiger who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1926; and the Americans George Frederick Dick who devised the means of preventing scarlet fever and E. W. Goodpasture who spent most of his career in Tennessee. Mention should also be made of the fictional pathologist detective John Thorndyke who appears in the novels of the British physician and writer Richard Austin Freeman.