• poem
• pathology
• food

We read the poem by Dr Tirumalae with interest.¹ Our particular interest stems from the work we did some years ago on the understanding, use, and potential modernisation of food terms in pathology. Having moved south from Lancashire and Cheshire, respectively, we found our missionary zeal to maintain the position of “sago spleen” as core knowledge in the medical curriculum was thwarted. The students of the South did not find reference to a Lancashire pudding manufactured from imported Indonesian tree bark to be of value in their education at all. In an attempt to rectify this we tried to update archaic food terms to ones more fitting to the 21st century. However, we stayed in the South and continued to modernise a small part of pathology, some years ahead of the “Pathology Modernisation Programme”. We hope the following references^2–4 may be of some interest to Dr Tirumalae and the readers of this journal.