Pathologists have to recognize the various lesions responsible for diseases whether they practise in public or in private hospitals. Thus, they daily give precise diagnoses and features of the development and probable courses of the diseases. All these investigations and controls of diagnoses concern a lot of chapters of pathology and make up a great deal of objective and available data for medical research and especially epidemiological research.

A systematic registration of mortality and morbidity from digestive cancers was started in January 1976 in the French department of COTE-D'Or (population 455,727). In the course of two years 913 new cases of digestive cancers were recorded. Nearly half of these cancers were colorectal cancers. The survey gives informations on histology, stage of the disease and survival. The morbidity survey allows comparison with the incidence rate of digestive cancers in other countries.

Pathology laboratories in the Burgundy region have recently been equipped with mini-computers using the same software and working method. This report brings together their histological records, stored on magnetic discs, and describes the first results of this regional data base. Malignant lymphomas were chosen as a pilot study and evaluated between January 1976 and December 1977. After a brief presentation of the method, 246 cases of malignant lymphoma are analysed: 95 of Hodgkins disease, 103 of non-Hodgkins malignant lymphoma of the nodes and 48 cases of extranodal non-Hodgkins malignant lymphoma. The distribution of patients in terms of sex and ten year age groups is analysed, together with the various incidence rates for a year in Burgundy and in its four administrative units (Cote-d'Or, Nievre, Saone-et-Loire and Yonne).

A case is described of testicular feminisation syndrome in a 19-yr-old patient with a normal female appearance. A laparotomy with removal of the gonads was performed. The latter looked like testes with intraparenchymal nodules. Light and electron microscopy study of these nodules revealed the presence of immature seminiferous-like tubules and of Leydig cell clusters. The tubules were filled with clear Sertoli cells, few degenerative dark cells and scanty spermatogonia. Thin collagen bundles surrounded the tubules and the foci of Leydig cells without any crystals of Reinke. The immaturity of all these cellular components could be connected with a mutation at a repressive locus which could be responsible for the abnormalities observed in the different steps of androgen action at target cell level.