an infinitesimal percentage of all cases reviewed, but to the individual whose limb or whose sight is saved or lost, nothing could be more important.
Institute review of diagnosis is important, also, in preventing possible imposition on the Government or injustice to the serviceman in cases involving line-of-duty questions as to responsibility for death or disablement. Thus, Institute review has forestalled the collection of compensation for nonexistent disease and, on the other hand, has altered erroneous diagnoses of the causes of deaths which, if allowed to stand, would have denied benefits due the serviceman's family.
To many, and perhaps to most, of those outside medical circles, pathology is vaguely recognized as a special sort of medical activity, and the pathologist is a dim and remote background figure. This attitude was reflected in an aside from President Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was called upon to dedicate the new building of the Institute in May 1955. Turning to his friend and physician, Lt. Gen. Leonard D. Heaton, just before making the dedicatory address, the President said, "Leonard, what am I doing getting up to dedicate a building for pathology, when I don't even know what pathology is?"
In telling of the incident, General Heaton adds the comment that however little the President knew then what pathology is, "he would soon know"—having in mind the medical and surgical experiences that lay ahead of him. President Eisenhower, indeed, began to learn about pathology that same afternoon of the dedication, "For the enlightenment of this audience," he said in his opening remarks, "it is indeed fortunate that Dr. [Brig. Gen. Elbert] DeCoursey saw fit (in his address of welcome) to tell us about pathology. Because for myself, I can assure you that I have learned more in the last 5 minutes than I knew in my entire life before."
The most common picture of the pathologist in the popular mind—insofar as there is such a picture—is probably that of the specialist who advises the surgeon as to whether the tissues to be removed are, or are not, malignant. That, indeed, is an important part of what the specialist in pathology does, but it is, after all, a part only.
As Dr. James Milton Robb, of Detroit—not himself a pathologist—put it in his presidential address before the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, in 1952:
* * * the study of pathology in its relatively short life has grown from an investigation or the changes found in the human body after death and their correlation with the signs of disease which had been observed during life to include almost anything which had to
