General histological woes: Encore. Tissues, please.

In a previous essay, we wrote about the shortcomings of the four basic tissue dogma of histology - miscellaneous tissues lumped under the ill-fitting name "connective tissues" and the existence of human tissues that are not recognized as subtypes of any of the four "basic types". A provisional reclassification of human tissues was constructed to improve the precision and completeness of the tissue taxonomy. Here, we address criticisms from a recent paper that claims that the four basic tissue dogma is more useful than that revised classification in medical education and in clinical practice. Some of the criticism appears to arise from the common misconception of a tissue as simply an array of similar cells.