1832

Thomas Hodgkin submits his paper, “On Some Morbid Appearances of the Absorbent Glands and Spleen” to the Medical and Chirurgical Society (later renamed the Royal Society of Medicine), where the paper was buried in volume 17 of its Medico-Chirurgical Transactions. Based on autopsies performed as pathologist at Guy’s Hospital, Hodgkin described “massive, firm lymph glands, unusual in their uniformity and absence of inflammation, and an enlarged spleen.” He “had taken the first key step – recognition of a new disease and careful description of its presentation and progression” (C. Jacobs, 16). Only in 1865 was Hodgkin given his due when another Guys Hospital pathologist, Samuel Wilks, published his classic “Cases of Enlargement of the Lymphatic Glands and Spleen (or Hodgkin’s Disease) with Remarks.” Wilks, after drafting the paper, discovered that four of his illustrative cases from the Hospital’s Museum of Pathology had been reported on by Hodgkin 24 years earlier (C. Jacobs, 23). Modern understanding of Hodgkin’s disease came only in 1902, when Dorothy Reed, a 28-year-old pathologist at Johns Hopkins, published findings in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Report that differentiated the disease from TB and established microscopic criteria for its diagnosis. In every case of Hodgkin’s, she found the same abnormally oversized cell, unobserved in any other disease, containing multiple nuclei; it was subsequently named the Reed-Sternberg cell, despite the fact that Reed’s findings overturned Carl Sternberg’s erroneous theory of Hodgkin’s as TB of the “lymphatic apparatus” (24-27).