Did you know that 18 November has been designated the International Pathology Day?

Various pathology centres around the world will be hosting events to raise public awareness about pathology and its role in healthcare on that day.

More information is available at http://www.ilovepathology.org/

The Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences (belonging to Faculty of Health Sciences) has been split into two departments.

The Department of Pathology is headed by Professor Carolyn Williamson and has 8 divisions

• Anatomical Pathology [and related website: Pathology Learning Centre]
• Chemical Pathology
• Forensic Medicine and Toxicology
• Haematology
• Human Genetics
• Immunology [and related website: Immunopaedia]
• Medical Microbiology
• Medical Virology

The Department of Integrative Biomedical Sciences is headed by Professor Ed Sturrock and has 3 divisions

• Medical Biochemistry and Structural Biology
• Chemical and Systems Biology
• Computational Biology

Other related UCT links

• Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine
• Gender Health and Justice Research Unit
• Clinical Research Centre

While using a word form to mark a student’s project submission, I noticed that every time I typed on the underlined bit, the letters pushes the underline away. Now, pathologists often have a bit of obsessive compulsive personality trait, so this matter deserves some serious research. The article by Word MVPs Suzanne S. Barnhill and Dave Rado is probably the easiest for simple Word users like me to follow. The process is quite simple.

• Use 1 row multi-column tables for each line that contains text and underlined entry fields.
• Set 0 for cell margins
• Set no borders for text cells, and bottom border for entry fields, i.e. the text goes in one cell (which has no borders), the adjacent underlined field goes into the next cell (which a bottom border).
• Afterwards the tables can be joined together (by deleting the blank lines between the tables) and the height of cells adjusted. Also remove gridlines from view.

The end result is a form that can be printed but also entered digitally.

For multiline fields, one can select the underlined paragraphs and edit borders for the paragraphs and choose a dotted line for bottom border (other borders off) and edit the paragraph properties to make it single line and 6pt above each paragraph.

A medical undergraduate asked me today how to “learn” pathology. Learning and memorisation are not the same thing, but memorisation is a good place to start. While there are many ways to memorise facts and a good understanding of the subject helps, an efficient way to systematically memorise large amounts of fairly incomprehensible material (e.g. a new language, e.g. pathology) is to use software based spaced repetition, where facts are presented in appropriately timed intervals to maximise retention without unnecessary repetition. A free software example is Mnemosyne. Other alternatives include supermemo which has many advanced features and memrise, which has many online courses.