Thomas Hodgkin Lymphoma Research

Lymphoma is a type of cancer developed from lymphocytes in the blood (lls.org). There are two major types, Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin (lls.org). Hodgkin lymphoma differentiates from non-Hodgkin because it specifically develops in the Hodgkin tissues in the lymphatic system (lls.org). The classic symptom of Lymphoma, enlarged lymph nodes or tumors of the lymph nodes, was first observed in the 17th century by an Italian biologist named Marcell Malpighi. (Lakhtakia & Burney, 2015). Very little more was observed about the disease until the 19th century, when Thomas Hodgkin, a researcher known as “inspector of the dead” due to the great number of autopsies he conducted, presented a paper on several patients with painless enlargement of their lymph nodes (Lakhtakia & Burney, 2015). Twenty-four years later in 1856, another researcher named Samuel Wilks noticed enlarged lymph nodes on several of patients and referred to the disease as “Hodgkin’s lymphoma” after Thomas Hodgkin (Lakhtakia & Burney, 2015). While lymphoma was observed as far back as the 1600s, most of the important aspects of lymphoma have been discovered since the mid-twentieth century (Aisenberg, …show more content…
In 1956, a clinical study by Rappaport was published which differentiated Hodgkin lymphoma from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma based on the size of lymphoid cells and the nodularity of the tumors