Journal of Clinical Experimental Pathology includes the study of the etiology, mechanisms and manifestations of disease. Techniques and knowledge gained from other disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, microbiology, biochemistry and histology is utilized. The information obtained from the study of pathology is necessary prior to developing methods to control and prevent diseases.
Pathology is the precise study and diagnosis of disease. The word pathology is from Ancient pathos, "feeling, suffering"; and -????a, -logia, "the study of". Pathologization, to pathologize, refers to the process of defining a condition or behavior as pathological, e.g. pathological gambling. Pathologies is synonymous with diseases. The suffix "path" is used to indicate a disease, e.g. psychopath.
Pathology addresses 4 components of disease: cause/etiology, mechanisms of development (pathogenesis), structural alterations of cells (morphologic changes), and the consequences of changes (clinical manifestations).
Pathology is further separated into divisions, based on either the system being studied (e.g. veterinary pathology and animal disease) or the focus of the examination (e.g. forensic
pathology and determining the cause of death).
The term general pathology is also used to describe the practice of both anatomical and clinical pathology.
Pathology began to develop as a subject during the 19th Century through teachers and physicians that studied pathology. They referred to it as pathological anatomy or morbid anatomy. However, pathology as a field of medicine was not recognized until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 19th century, physicians realized that disease-causing pathogens, germs, created themselves and that symptoms were not the vital characteristics of a disease. Through the new information gathered regarding germ reproduction, physicians began to compare the characteristics of one germs symptoms as they developed within an affected individual to another germs characteristics and symptoms. This realization led to the foundational understanding that diseases are able to create themselves, and that they can affect human beings in unique ways. In order to determine causes of diseases, medical experts used the most common and widely accepted assumptions or symptoms of their times. This is true for those in the past and today
