CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
Who is the intended audience, and is there anything like this book on the market?
This book will be of value to pathology residents and fellows but also to practicing pathologists who see endocrine cases. It is a handy reference to have at your workstation when dealing with cases in your day-to-day routine regardless of whether you practice in a general or specialized area.
There is not really anything else like this book. There are few textbooks of endocrine pathology that have this scope, and the few that are available tend to be much more detailed, less practical, with fewer figures.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I am a pathologist who started my medical career in internal medicine with the intention to be an endocrinologist. I trained in Toronto at a time when pathology was ignored in medical school and when I was in my residency, I realized that I did not understand the pathologies I was seeing on the wards and in the clinics. I decided to do a year of pathology, and quickly realized the potential of this field. I switched into pathology and met my mentor, Kalman Kovacs, [MD, PhD], who studied my favorite tissue: the master gland, pituitary. I then had the wonderful fortune to marry the world’s smartest endocrine oncologist, a man who sees patients with endocrine tumors—we are the ultimate multidisciplinary team.
Throughout my career, I have focused on ensuring the recognition and growth of endocrine as a subspecialty in pathology, but I have also been an advocate for the advancement of pathology. This field has a strong history, but it evolved from the advances made by investigative clinicians. As medicine has become more complex, technology has evolved, and knowledge has increased exponentially, pathologists must secure the role of the knowledge base and the enforcer of quality testing in medicine. However, while we oversee complex laboratories, we also must focus on a field where we have a depth of knowledge from the gene to the cell line to the mouse model and to the human patient. My experience in endocrine pathology has taught me the importance of a depth of knowledge in a specific field and the value of being an integral member of a care team. I firmly believe that pathologists who understand the diseases they diagnose are the best placed to see patients, explain their disease, and help them make decisions about their management.
In 15 years as head of the largest academic department of pathology in Canada at University Health Network, I was able to build that model of a large department of highly subspecialized individuals, creating a team with in-depth knowledge of every technology and the various pathology disciplines, with expert diagnosticians and scientific investigators pushing new boundaries. We developed a high-quality biobank in 2001 and implemented digital pathology in 2006. I am proud that much of the knowledge in this book comes from samples in that biobank and most of the images are from digital slides.