Introduction to Clinical Pathology

These lectures will cover the area at the interface between basic science and clinical medicine. This is
normally covered by medical students during the first 2 years of their training but remains relevant
throughout the undergraduate course and beyond. This is, also, true for nurses and biomedical ... read more/>scientists. They focus on how diseases are developed (their pathogenesis) and how this results in
changes in the normal structure and function of normal cells and tissues. The emphasis is on how
diseases in different parts of the body share common underlying mechanisms of causation and effect.
The emphasis is not on individual diseases but on diseases in general. In standard pathology textbooks
this material is included in the section covering "General Pathology". Explaining how diseases develop,
lays the foundation for understanding individual diseases including how they manifest and how they
affect the body. It is in the light of this that content of the proposed lecture titles should be understood.
Knowing, for example, the routes by which cancers spread, in general, provides a framework for
understanding how specific cancers do so. Furthermore, understanding what causes diseases is
essential for treating and preventing them. For example, knowing that most large bowel cancers arise
from adenomas is the basis of the Bowel Cancer Screening Program. Of course, when the diseases of
the different organ systems are covered ("Systemic Pathology"), the knowledge covered in this course
will provides the conceptual basis for understanding them and emphasising what they have in common.
This is important from the pedagogical perspective as it encourages students to apply what they have
already been taught to new contexts and stresses the importance of understanding over simple factual
recall.
Many textbooks carry the perspective of developed countries. The selection of the lectures (and
lecturers), and their individual content, in this course will seek to redress this imbalance. The
development of diseases will be placed in their social and environmental context.