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A Note from History |
Keywords: history of pathology, history of laboratory medicine, coinage of medical terms
Some of those who invented medical terms were well-known physicians and medical scientists but many of them were, and still remain, obscure contributors. Beyond that, the two dozen entries selected for inclusion in this article affirm that the time-honored statement, that in history there is no beginning, is inaccurate.
Reginald H. Fitz (1843–1913), a Boston physician, was the first to give a complete description of the symptoms and the pathology of inflammation of the appendix. He replaced the centuries-old term "coarctation of the appendix" with "appendicitis" [1]. In a long and detailed paper, he reported a series of 25 cases with a recommendation (that is followed even today) that appendectomy should be carried out within 24 hr if symptoms had not subsided.
The word "arteriosclerosis" was first used by Jean G. Lobstein (1777–1835), a professor of surgery and principal orthopedic surgeon at Strasburg [2]. He also introduced the term "osteogenesis imperfecta."
A short-lived Scottish physician, Alan Burns (1781–1813), described several green tumors of the head and neck region [3]. He called them "chlorosarcoma," which was renamed "chloroma" in 1853 by A. King.
Although Aurelius Celsus (25 BC–AD 50), a Roman physician, is credited with naming anal and perineal tubercles "condyloma," it was Gabriele Fallopius (1523–1562), an Italian anatomist–of Fallopian tube fame–who was the first to distinguish syphilitic "condyloma lata" and non-syphilitic "condyloma acuminata" in 1563 [4].
Max Sänger (1853–1903), a Prague gynecologist, named abdominal fibrous tumors "desmoid tumor" in 1884. [5]. Later, desmoid tumors were divided into abdominal and extra-abdominal forms.
"Echinococcus" was named in 1808 by Karl A. Rudolphi (1771–1832), a Dutch helminthologistphysician [6].
When Adolph Hannover (1814–1894), a Danish pathologist, coined the word "epithelioma," in 1843, he did not recognize it as a malignant tumor [7]. It was George Adami (1862–1926), a Canadian pathologist, in 1908, who first indicated that epithelioma was a squamous epithelial neoplasm with less malignant potential than squamous carcinoma.
Jean B. Helmont (1577–1644), a Belgian physician and a founder of biochemistry, was the first to recognize the significance of ferments and invented the word "gas." He was also the first to introduce gravimetric analysis of urine. His collected writings were published in 1648, after his death [8].
Harvey W. Cushing (1869–1939). a renowned American neurosurgeon, described and named a benign brain tumor "hemangioblastoma." The word was first printed in a book [9] he co-authored with Percival Bailey, (1892–1973), another famous American neurosurgeon.
The term "leukemia" was introduced by Rudolph L. K. Virchow (1821 – 1902), the German pathologist, in 1845. He described in an autopsy report that "white blood" (white blood cells) filled the spleen, liver, and all other organs [10].
Anigono Zappoli, an Italian surgeon, published a case report in 1843 entitled "Liposarcoma." According to his description and illustration, the tumor was a 28 cm mass on the right shoulder of a 56-yr-old man. The tumor was pedunculated and the patient was able to carry it on his back or on the front of his chest [11]. It is conjectural whether the tumor was a true sarcoma or a large lipoma. Until the late 1800s, all large fleshy tumors were called sarcomas.
Hans Kundrat (1845–1893), an Austrian physician, described and named "lymphosarcoma" in 1893. He specifically mentioned that it is a generalized disease of the lymphatic system and is always fatal [12]. Until the early 1900s the disease was often referred to as Kundrat’s disease or Kundrat’s lymphoma.
Joseph C. A. Récamier (1774–1852), a well-known French gynecologist, 12-years before he invented the vaginal speculum, coined the term "metastasis" for distant spreading of cancer [13].
It is not widely known that the celebrated German poet, Johann Wolgang Goethe (1749– 1832) was also an accomplished anatomist and a pioneer of evolution. Among other things, he discovered the intermaxillary bone and is credited with the first use of the word "morphology" [14].
Ernest Neumann (1834–1918), a German pathologist, first noticed cellular changes in the bone marrow in leukemia and proposed the term "myelogenous leukemia" [15]. He implied that the deadly disease originates in the bone marrow.
Although it is believed that Erasistratus (circa 300–250 BC), a Greek physician, was the first who used the term parenchyma, there is no proof of it. The earliest use of the word "parenchyma" in writing is found in 1686 in a book by William Salmon, a London-based general practitioner [16].
Byron Bramwell (1847–1931), an English physician, was known for his books on intracranial tumors and diseases of the spinal cord. After treating patients with arsenic for the idiopathic anemia of Addison for years without success, it occurred to Bramwell that the disease was due to a great diminution in the number of red blood cells and he renamed it "pernicious anaemia." He published and illustrated several cases in his 1896 atlas [17].
The term "pheochromocytoma" was introduced in 1886 by a largely unknown scientist, H. Poll, in in his brief chapter in a book [18] edited by Wilhelm A. Hertwig (1849–1922). Professor Hertwig, in the late 1800s, gained fame as a research scientist in Berlin. He demonstrated that fertilization is accomplished by entrance of a spermatozoon into the ovum. It remains an enigma how Poll came up with the term pheochromocytoma in the same year and the same country in which Felix Fränkel (1829–1897), a pathologist, first described a chromaffin cell tumor of the adrenal.
Giulio Bizzozero (1846–1901), an Italian physician, introduced the term "blood platelets" in 1882. He deduced their role in coagulation and thrombosis [19]. Fifteen years earlier, he had demonstrated, for the first time, that erythropoiesis and leukopoiesis take place in the bone marrow.
Alexander Ogston (1844–1929), an Aberdeen surgeon, noted the constant presence of micrococci in abscesses. He coined the term "Staphylococcus" and discovered Staphylococcus aureus [20].
William C. MacCarty (1880–1964), a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, introduced the term "strawberry gallbladder" in 1910 [21]. His article contains one of the earliest color photographs of pathology specimens. He was a pioneer and enthusiast of definitive intraoperative diagnosis by frozen section.
"Streptococcus" was named by one of the luminaries in surgery, Christian A. T. Billroth (1829–1894), a professor in Vienna. Billroth was a pioneer in abdominal surgery and introduced antisepsis in surgery four years before Joseph Lister’s article was published on antiseptic principles. The word Streptococcus was first printed in Billroth’s famous surgical treatise [22] in 1863, the year Robert Koch was a 20-yr-old medical student.
Leila C. Knox, a pathologist at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City, reviewed the literature on synoviomas, synovial mesotheliomas, synovial sarcoendotheliomas, and malignant synoviomas and she introduced, in 1936, the term "synovial sarcoma" [23]. She identified and illustrated two distinct microscopic forms: fibrosarcoma-like (monophasic synovial sarcoma) and pseudo-glandular (biphasic synovial sarcoma). One of the unexplained curiosities in the history of pathology is that although the pioneer soft tissue tumor pathologist, Arthur Purdy Stout of Columbia University in New York City, used the term synovial sarcoma in 1953 in his atlas on soft tissue tumors, he did not cite the article by Leila Knox that was published in a leading medical journal 17 years earlier [23].
Alfred Donné (1801–1878), a French gynecologist and part-time public health physician, studied the vaginal secretions of prostitutes in Paris. He described, illustrated, and named the motile microscopic organisms "Trichomonas vaginalis" [24].
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