pathologist

American  

[puh-thah-luh-jist] / pəˈθɑ lə dʒɪst /

noun

pathologists plural

1. a person who studies or works in pathology.

2. a medical doctor who specializes in diagnosing diseases.

3. Also called forensic pathologist. a medical doctor whose specialty is determining why someone died by examining their body.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• pathologists
  plural

Explanation

A student who is fascinated with the causes of disease and death might decide to go to medical school and become a pathologist. A medical doctor who performs autopsies to learn how patients died is a pathologist. Other pathologists trace illness back to their root causes, or diagnose diseases such as cancer. When a doctor decides to to become a pathologist, her field is called "pathology." The Greek root of both words is pathologikos, "treating of disease," which combines pathos, "suffering," with logia, "study, or the study of."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

pathologist pathologists

The American physician and pathologist George Whipple had shown that liver helped dogs recover from anemia caused by blood loss.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 25, 2026

Dr Marta Cohen is a paediatric pathologist who has come out of retirement to help reduce the long waiting times bereaved parents face before they can find out how their child died.

From BBC ● May 29, 2026

“It’s probably the perfect storm of a contagion coming into the right contact for a confined group,” said Jeffrey SoRelle, a pathologist at the University of Texas Southwestern whose lab researches viral genomics.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 6, 2026

It's precisely the complexity of Muirhead's personality that makes her such a compelling figure as, according to Allott, she "was articulate and intelligent, a promising young pathologist with eight years of medical training".

From BBC ● Apr. 28, 2026

Nancy had joined Johnson’s Ebola project as the pathologist.

From "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston

Even today, pathologists diagnosing disorders such as Alzheimer's disease typically inspect a handful of tissue samples from an organ containing some 86 billion neurons.

From BBC ● Jul. 13, 2026

Everlab’s platform ingests and organizes documents and data from doctors, specialists and pathologists, compiling patient records that it augments with real-time data from users’ existing wearable devices.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 16, 2026

Some regions, such as Midlands and South West, do not have any child pathologists.

From BBC ● May 29, 2026

She says the number of pathologists has been falling for two decades and the shortage is now in "the most serious situation that we have been in the last 20 years".

From BBC ● May 29, 2026

The unsolved Ramsey case had inspired me to read up on the famous forensic pathologists Michael Baden and Henry Lee.

From "Confessions of a Murder Suspect" by James Patterson