The science of the causes and effects of diseases; the typical behaviour of a disease; mental, social, or linguistic abnormality or malfunction.
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Greek17th centurywell-attested
From Greek "παθολογία" (pathología), a compound of "πάθος" (páthos, suffering, experience, emotion) + "λογία" (-logía, study of), from "λόγος" (lógos, word, reason). The first element "πάθος" derives from PIE *kʷent(h)- (to suffer), though some scholars connect it to *bʰendʰ- (to bind, to suffer). "Páthos" in Greek had a broader semantic range than its English reflex — it meant any experience or emotion, not
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Jean Fernel, theFrench physician who organized medicine into physiology (normal function), pathology (disease), and therapeutics (treatment) in 1554, also coined the word 'physiology.' His tripartite structure — understand how the body works, understand how it breaks, then figure out how to fix it — became the standard framework for medical education and persists to this day.
the systematic study of disease. The root "páthos" also gave "sympathy" (feeling together), "empathy" (feeling into), "apathy" (without feeling), "antipathy" (feeling against), and "pathos" as a rhetorical term. Modern pathology as a medical discipline was established by Rudolf Virchow in the 19th century. Key roots: pathos (Greek: "suffering, disease"), -logia (Greek: "study of, discourse"), (no established PIE root) (Proto-Indo-European: "the PIE source of Greek pathos is uncertain; *kwent(h)- is sometimes proposed but not consensus").