Peter Scheuer, who has died aged 77, was Britain's leading liver pathologist; his advances greatly improved the understanding and diagnosis - and hence the treatment - of liver diseases. For 40 years he worked with Dame Sheila Sherlock at the Royal Free hospital (RFH) in Hampstead, north London, which together they made a world centre of excellence in hepatology.

Before biopsies became available, many patients were not well enough to undergo diagnostic surgery. These samples, rather like a geologist's sample of the Earth's core but on a tiny scale - they were 2mm wide and 10-15mm long - could be taken with relative ease under local anaesthetic and sedation from patients whose liver disease made them unable to tolerate general anaesthetics. In patients with diffuse liver disease, a biopsy was likely to be representative of the entire liver. In those with localised disease, the sophisticated imaging techniques that have been introduced in the last 30 years enabled the diseased part of the liver to be identified, so that the biopsy was taken from it.

Sherlock, the world's leading liver physician, learned how to take liver biopsies in the US and introduced the technique to Britain. Effective management of liver disease requires close collaboration between the clinician and the pathologist, something that Sherlock and Scheuer had. Scheuer carried out original research on how to interpret liver biopsies, and became the leading practitioner, author and teacher on the subject.

Scheuer was born in Hamburg, the youngest of four children of a Viennese family who, though Jewish, were practising Lutheran Christians. His father was a lawyer. By 1937, both his brothers had been expelled from school as Jews, and the family had returned to Vienna. A year later, as the Nazis annexed Austria, they made their way, separately, to England, aided by Quaker organisations.

At the age of 10, Scheuer was sent to boarding school to help improve his English, and cried himself to sleep at night. Four years later he transferred to Abbotsholme school, Derbyshire. where he was happy, and developed an interest in biology. At 19, he started work as a laboratory technician at Bromley Cottage hospital, becoming particularly interested in histology, the branch of pathology concerned with the microscopic appearance of normal and diseased tissues. With the encouragement of the pathologist in charge, Dr John Keall, he decided on a career in medicine.

Scheuer was one of 12 male students out of 100 at the RFH medical school; it had been obliged to admit men when the male-only schools had first admitted women. He was drawn to basic medical sciences and graduated with honours in obstetrics and gynaecology. He did one of his pre-registration house jobs in Britain and another in St John's, Newfoundland, where his mother and sister had emigrated, and followed this with national service in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Singapore.

Returning to England, Scheuer became senior house officer at the RFH under Professor Kenneth Hill, who fostered his interest in liver disease. He was appointed lecturer in morbid anatomy in 1959, the same year that Sherlock became the RFH's first chair of medicine. In 1961, he earned an MD with a thesis on the pathology of blocking disease of the veins, and became lecturer in pathology and honorary consultant. He then spent a year on a scholarship with the world's leading liver pathologist, Dr Hans Popper, at Mount Sinai hospital, New York.

On returning to the RFH, Scheuer became senior lecturer, then professor of histopathology and, in 1983, professor of pathology and departmental head. He was the first male graduate of the hospital to become a consultant there, and the first to hold a chair.

His clear and concise textbook, Liver Biopsy Interpretation, was published in 1968 (the seventh edition, jointly with Dr Jay Lefkowitch, appeared in 2005). He also edited Pathology of the Liver (1976), a fifth edition of which, with Roddy MacSween and Peter Anthony, will be published this year.

In 1967 Scheuer and his counterparts in other countries realised they needed to revise the confused nomenclature of chronic hepatitis and formed the European Association for the Study of the Liver. The second meeting, in Zurich in 1968, established a classification that held, worldwide, for 25 years. Sherlock nicknamed the group the Gnomes of Zurich, and a student made them a red pointed hat, which has been worn by the chairman ever since.

Scheuer carried out original research over a wide area of liver disease. He demonstrated that prostaglandin E2 attenuated the hepatitis caused by paracetamol overdose. He campaigned for better diagnosis of intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy, a condition that caused about half of all stillbirths.

A quiet, soft-spoken man, cultured, well-informed, laid back and humorous, Scheuer was a great researcher and teacher. He also loved opera. He studied piano and violin at the London College of Music while still a medical student, and the cello while on national service.

He married Dr Louise Withington in 1960, when he was a senior house officer at the RFH and she was a researcher in the anatomy department; they met at the medical school music society. Now a forensic anthropologist, she survives him, as do their two sons.

· Peter Joseph Scheuer, pathologist, born November 15 1928; died March 1 2006.