The authors summarized the results of research in the field of pathology carried out within the framework of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences for 40 years of its existence, from 1944 to 1984. The main directions of this research are defined and the role of outstanding Soviet pathologists who created their scientific schools and who made an important contribution into various problems of pathology is pointed out. The continuity between the traditional and modern trends of investigations carried out by means of both classical and the most recent methods of the structural-functional analysis is shown. Particular attention by the scientists of the Academy during the whole period of its existence has been drawn to the problems of general pathology, the discussion of the philosophical-methodological aspects of modern medicine and the criticism of modern reactionary bourgeois trends in biology and medicine.