Definition of "pathology" [pa•thol•o•gy]

• The scientific study of the nature of disease and its causes, processes, development, and consequences. Also called pathobiology. (noun)
• The anatomic or functional manifestations of a disease: the pathology of cancer. (noun)
• A departure or deviation from a normal condition: "Neighborhoods plagued by a self-perpetuating pathology of joblessness, welfare dependency, crime” ( Time). (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Here the pathology is attributed to a narrator who crosses "the dreary moor/In the clear moonlight" and reaches an abandoned hut, where he has his own version of the hunger-experience."
• "This pathology is the contagion or stain produced by the cognitive business of feeling and thinking about the world, which business halts with traumatically abrupt force, the world's nature lingering far past it and caring nothing for it, like the blind triumph of"
• "This film looks at what it calls the pathology behind the Wal-Mart bashing and holds the chain actually improves communities and its workers ` lives."