The clinico-pathological conference, based upon Giovanni Battista Morgagni’s legacy, remains of fundamental importance even in the era of the vanishing autopsy

Abstract

Walter Cannon and Richard Cabot inaugurated the clinico-pathological conference (CPC) at Harvard Medical School at the beginning of the twentieth century, but this approach to anatomo-clinical correlation was first introduced by Giovanni Battista Morgagni at the University of Padua in the eighteenth century. The CPC consists of the presentation of a clinical case, in which past and recent medical histories of the patient, with all relevant information about laboratory tests including biopsy results, therapy and, eventually in a fatal case, the autopsy, are discussed. This is done for an audience of trainees and all physicians involved in the care for the patient. The CPC is still in use in many academic hospitals, as a teaching tool not only for undergraduate and graduate medical trainees, but also for postgraduate continuous medical education, in spite of the progressively declining autopsy rate. CPCs represent the ideal occasion for fruitful discussion between the two “souls” of medicine, i.e., the clinical, with its focus on the patient, and the pathological, with its focus on understanding disease. To discontinue using them would be equal to denying that modern medicine originated in Morgagni’s method.