Pathology
/pəˈθɒlədʒi/noun
The study of disease, its causes and the changes it makes in tissue; also the department that examines samples.
The Greek roots
Literally: “study of suffering”
The story of the word
Páthos in Greek covers anything that happens to you, from an emotion to a wound, so pathología is the account of what a body undergoes. English took it in the 1610s, well before anyone had a microscope good enough to see what was happening. The same root gives sympathy, feeling with, apathy, feeling nothing, and pathetic, which meant moving to pity for centuries before it came to mean feeble.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1610s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Pathology confirmed the margins were clear.
Half of medical school is anatomy and the other half is pathology explaining what went wrong with it.