Pathology

“The chief preoccupation of most pathologists between World Wars I and II . . . was their relationship with bacteriology. Just as more time and energy was spent working out physiology’s relationship with biochemistry than it did with pathology or other basic science disciplines, so too did pathology have to deal with the problem of its daughter science bacteriology. In fact, many investigators in the 1910s and 1920s considered bacteriology the experimental wellspring of pathology. . . By the 1930s it was clear, especially with the explosions of viral research, that microbiology was too large to be contained within pathology. In that decade, an increasing number of medical school deans engineered the two disciplines’ fission, so that bacteriology might stand on its own, with everything that implied in terms of careers and patrons” (Maulitz, 230, 231)