ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a brief history of the biological and therapeutic milestones pertaining to haematological malignancies. The first description of a primary malignant tumour of the lymph node was made in 1832 by Thomas Hodgkin at Guy's Hospital in London. In 1872, Paul Langerhans in Freiburg, described the histological features of Hodgkin's disease and drew attention to the presence of multinucleate giant cells, which were described in greater detail in 1898 by Carl Sternberg in Vienna, and Dorothy Reed in 1902 in Baltimore. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of cases were described in different parts of the world characterized by an increase in the number of the different blood cells and often accompanied by an enlarged spleen. At the turn of the twentieth century, William Osler, Turk and Parkes-Weber provided detailed descriptions of polycythemia vera and its features which overlapped with the leukaemias in general.