Limitations of clinical and biological histology.

Histology, including histochemistry, histopathology, electron microscopy and immunocytochemistry, can be considered as two disciplines--clinical and biological. The former is used to make a clinical diagnosis, based on empirical comparisons between, on the one hand, the clinical health of a normal subject with the histological appearances of the organs, and on the other hand, the clinical disease or syndrome of a patient, with the different histological appearances of the organs believed by the clinicians to be affected. It is intended that biological histology should be the most accurate description possible of the structure and chemistry of the living tissue in the intact healthy organism. Copyright 2000 Harcourt Publishers Ltd.