Autopsy

Share | A sign hanging over the door to the pathology lab in Paris read, "Death comes to the aid of the living." Around 1793, Marie Francois Bichat (1771-1802) moved to Paris from Lyon bringing clinical pathology to the bedside. The formalization of autopsy as part of clinical medicine catapulted the art of diagnosis and pathophysiology into a science and onto a quantum advancement in the understanding of disease and the rationality of patient care.
Today that tool, autopsy, which made American medicine the science that it became is all but lost to physicians. We still claim to be the most advanced, but the numbers say otherwise. See global burden of disease (GBD).