Pathology on the edge of interdisciplinarity. A historical epitome.

Pathology is a bridging discipline that involves both basic and clinical biomedical sciences. In this context, it includes both descriptive and mechanistic approaches, with the final goals of further understanding the anatomic and functional changes and underlying molecular events involved in disease-related processes. Pathology studies mainly comprise macroscopic and microscopic examinations, and involve the visual recognition of different patterns in cells and tissues. In time elapsed to this end, it has adopted a dazzling array of methods and techniques from the most varied fields of natural and engineering sciences in order to optimize tissue analysis, which will be summarized in this article.