History
Leukemia was first observed by pathologist Rudolf Virchow in 1845. Observing an abnormally large number of white blood cells in a blood sample from a patient, Virchow called the condition Leukämie in German, which he formed from the two Greek words leukos (λευκός), meaning "white", and aima (αίμα), meaning "blood". Around ten years after Virchow's findings, pathologist Franz Ernst Christian Neumann found that one deceased leukemia patient's bone marrow was colored "dirty green-yellow" as opposed to the normal red. This finding allowed Neumann to conclude that a bone marrow problem was responsible for the abnormal blood of leukemia patients.
By 1900 leukemia was viewed as a family of diseases as opposed to a single disease. By 1947 Boston pathologist Sydney Farber believed from past experiments that aminopterin, a folic acid mimic, could potentially cure leukemia in children. The majority of the children with ALL who were tested showed signs of improvement in their bone marrow, but none of them were actually cured. This, however, led to further experiments.
In 1962, researchers Emil J. Freireich Jr. and Emil Frei III used combination chemotherapy to attempt to cure leukemia. The tests were successful with some patients surviving long after the tests.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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