Russian Holidays - Pathologist Day in Russia

On January 19, Russia celebrates Pathologist Day This holiday is dedicated to people who have chosen one of the most unusual professions Contrary to misconceptions, pathologists do not only autopsy corpses to determine the exact cause of death They also conduct intravital microscopic diagnostics of patient biomaterials, which are sent to them by oncologists, surgeons, urologists, and gynecologists An autopsy is performed by pathologists only if the person died of natural causes in a hospital or at home When it comes to violent deaths, forensic experts take matters into their own hands A pathologist is a specialist in the field of pathological anatomy, that is, a person who studies deviations from the norm that occur in the body The history of this scientific and applied discipline is rooted deep in antiquity For religious and ethical reasons, dissection was discouraged in many cultures For example, in Ancient Egypt, before mummification, organs were removed from the human body, and this procedure was carried out by special priests - paraschites, whom the rest of society treated with great contempt After opening the body of the deceased, they immediately threw the knife aside The Egyptians believed that at this moment a force emanated from the corpse that could harm living people After completing their work, the paraschites had to go to the desert and perform a purification ceremony, otherwise they were not allowed into any house Herodotus described in detail the process of preparing corpses for mummification in his work Herophilus was the first European physician to use autopsy A representative of the Alexandrian school, a student of Praxagoras of Cos, together with his student Erasistratus, dissected not only corpses There is historical evidence that they performed vivisection King Ptolemy II Philadelphus sentenced some criminals to a special type of death penalty, and they ended up on the table of doctors who dissected them alive Unfortunately, the works of Herophilus and his student have not survived to this day, but Aulus Cornelius Celsus, one of the Roman scientists, wrote in detail about the vivisection technique that they practiced It is worth noting that this procedure was performed to study human anatomy, that is, for good purposes, but the condemned died in hellish torment Religion quite often created obstacles for doctors who studied human anatomy Sometimes it got to the point that researchers had to dig up fresh corpses from graves under the cover of darkness They were committing a real crime, which, if caught, could cost them their lives The official “birth” of pathological anatomy is associated with the publication of the first pathological treatise by the Florentine physician Antonio Benevieni His work was based on twenty autopsy procedures The author described a total of almost 200 different pathologies of internal organs The entire history of pathological anatomy is divided into three large periods, each of which is directly related to the research methods used At first, pathologists learned about the human body exclusively through autopsy Then they moved on to more advanced microscopic examination and finally, in our time, molecular diagnostics appeared In the process of development of this science, the achievements of related disciplines - histology, biochemistry, molecular biology - were actively used In Russia, the first book on pathological anatomy was a translation of the work of the English doctor M Baillie, which the author supplemented with his own treatise on the relationship of this discipline with other areas of science It is believed that the development of pathological anatomy in Russia and Europe began in parallel At first, pathologists did not have their own department, so they were trained in anatomy courses The founder of the first school of pathologists in Moscow was Alexey Ivanovich Polunin