The Pathologist and Perinatal Medicine Part II Contributing Directly to Patient Care

Abstract

In perinatal medicine the pathologist can make an important direct contribution towards enhancing the overall quality of patient care, not only because of the often urgent need for accurate information for reproduc tive counselling but also because of the particular nature of grief reactions to fetal and neonatal death. He or she has the opportunity to be part of a clinical team and abolish forever the image, which has persisted until recently in large hospitals and pathol- ogy institutes, of a remote and often uncommunicative figure, hunched over a microscope or autopsy table, in search of rare cases to add to his col- lection. The notion of the pathologist as physician is not a new one and several areas of clinical medicine, such as gastroenterology, hepatology, dermatology, nephrology and medical