Non-pathology: the bedrock of pathology.

Pathology, also called morbid anatomy, is macroscopically, microscopically, and molecularly so manifest an array of phenomena that it has compelled medical men to closely link it up with disease, dis-ease, and death. But there is more than meets the eye of the morbid anatomists, microscopists, and the molecular biologists. The obvious science of pathology is governed by numerous abstract, subtle, non-pathological factors. A pathological phenomenon is subservient to cosmic noumenon. Such a sea-change allows a newer perspective that cures modern medicine of many of its dogmas and provides epistemologically valid directions to research methodologies on the one hand and clinical practices on the other.

Cause of death--so-called designed event acclimaxing timed happenings.

Cause-of-death as an established global medical institution faces its greatest challenge in the commonplace observation that the healthy do not necessarily survive and the diseased do not necessarily die. A logical analysis of the assumed relationships between disease and death provides some insights that allow questioning the taken-for-granted relationship between defined disease/s and the final common parameter of death. Causalism as a paradigm has taken leave of all advanced sciences. In medicine, it is lingering on for anthropocentric reasons. Natural death does not come to pass because of some (replaceable) missing element, but because the evolution of the individual from womb to tomb has arrived at its final destination. To accept death as a physiologic event is to advance thanatology and to disburden medical colleges and hospitals of a lot of avoidable thinking and doing.

Understanding anatomical terms.

Words are our masters and words are our slaves, all depending on how we use them. The whole of medical science owes its origin to Greco-Roman culture and is replete with terms whose high sound is not necessarily accompanied by sound meaning. This is even more the case in the initial, pre-clinical years. Anatomical terminology seems bewildering to the initiate; and maybe that is a reason why love of anatomy as a subject does not always spill over through later years. Employing certain classifications of the origin of the anatomical terms, we have prepared an anthology that we hope will ease the student's task and also heighten the student's appreciation of the new terms. This centers on revealing the Kiplingian "how, why, when, where, what, and who" of a given term. This presentation should empower students to independently formulate a wide network of correlations once they understand a particular term. The article thus hopes to stimulate students' analytic and synthetic faculties as well. A small effort can reap large rewards in terms of enjoyment of the study of anatomy and the related subjects of histology, embryology, and genetics. It is helpful to teachers and students alike. This exercise in semantics and etymology does not demand of the student or his teacher any background in linguistics, grammar, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, anatomy, or medicine.

The nature of bones and joints: a new perspective.

In human ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, bones arrive late on the scene--long after neurogenesis, musculogenesis, organogenesis and so on are over--as islands of ossification in an ocean of collagen. This study confirms this developmental sequence by demonstrating, in cadavers, the rather independent nature of bone, to which nothing--muscle, tendon, ligament or articular cartilage--is attached. Bone is like the air in a tubeless tyre; it gives rigidity and shape to the tyre, and in return takes the shape of the tyre. The tibia, for example, is the bony tissue that is contained in tyre-like casing made of peritibial soft tissues whose inner limit is the periosteum, which continues proximally and distally as capsules of knee/ankle joint, and to which only are the articular cartilages of the knee and ankle attached, being clearly free from the bones. This study also exposes the truer nature of a joint wherein the articular cartilage assumes anatomic and physiologic significance hitherto unthought of.