Pathology is the branch of Medicine that studies diseases.
For many centuries, European physicians studied pathologies according to the ancient “Theory of Humorism“, positing that the functions of the human body were regulated by four fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.
Giovan Battista Morgagni (1682-1771), right here in the Hospital of Saint Francis the Greater, was the first to associate the symptoms of live patients to the lesions of organs he observed in their corpses, thus paving the way to modern Anatomical Pathology, which allowed to finally overcome the Theory of Humorism and to introduce the scientific method in diagnostic methodologies.
