On 3 May 2017, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and its Medical School, completed 180 years of continuous and uninterrupted operation. Celebration of this noteworthy anniversary deserved something special. To that end, the authors ­decided to prepare and publish an atlas of illustrated representative samples of the Medical School's extensive pathological­specimens collection.

The museum is housed in a specially designed area of the Medical School's 1st Department of Pathology and is the foremost and most extensive of its kind in Greece. It is continuously enriched with specimens selected from the 40,000 cases per year handled by the 1st Department of Pathology. The collection portrays the intertemporal course of various diseases commonly occurring in Greece. Incidence of several of these diseases has been significantly reduced through associated research and its contribution to the evolution of modern medicine.