A Pathological Rose by Any Other Name

As lecturers in pathology it is our task to impart a smattering of pathological knowledge to the modern Bristol medical student. In doing so we are forced to utilise the age old descriptive terms of surgical pathology passed down to us from time when Virchow was an SHO! Far from making our task easy, we are often asked to explain in terms more appropriate to the twentieth century what these archaic descriptions mean. The vast majority of these compare pathological entities to items of food. However many of these food items no longer form part of the daily life of the modern sophisticated Bristol student. This problem was brought home to one of the authors when, during a tutorial, he asked, tongue in cheek, "Who was Sago?" with reference to the much revered sago spleen of amyloid. The answers varied from "Is it named after a Japanese pathologist?" to "Isn't it a mountain range in Latvia?" This was particularly galling as the lecturer concerned had been raised as a child almost solely on a diet of sago pudding! We thought it appropriate therefore to embark on a modernising and updating of these ancient food analogies into a form more appropriate to the health conscious,