A once highly deadly and hopeless disease, Leukemia now brings about hope due to intense research and its new remedies to help cure those infected with the disease. Although Leukemia has been around for hundreds of years, scientists have only started to understand the disease. The initial findings of Leukemia were made close to two hundred years ago, making the "new disease" an attractive one to study. .
Leukemia was formally discovered in the year 1827 by a physician named Alfred Velpeau. Dr. Velpeau was intrigued by a patient that had come through his office ill with a swollen abdomen, a fever, and a weak state of being. When this sixty-three-year-old patient died shortly after his visit to the doctor, Dr. Velpeau decided to perform an autopsy in order to find a more detailed answer to the cause of the patient's death. Dr. Velpeau noted that the man had a spleen twenty times the size of a normal spleen and blood mixed with pus. Unknowingly his discovery was the first accurate description of a Leukemia case. .
Another main idea of Leukemia was discovered ten years after Dr. Velpeau's discovery of pus in the blood of a Leukemia patient. This new key to Leukemia was discovered by Dr. Donne who also performed an autopsy and found the same symptoms in his forty-four-year-old woman in 1837. The only thing that Dr. Donne did differently was to go a step further and to place the pus infected blood under a microscope only to discover that the blood consisted of more than fifty percent white blood cells. .
Due to the over whelming amount of white blood cells a German physician by the name of Rudolf Virchow named the disease Weisses Blut meaning "white blood". He later changed it to Leukemia when he discovered two distinct types of the disease. One occurred in the spleen and the other in the lymph nodes (Silverstein 17-20).
Just like a school, Leukemia is diverse in such that it can be found represented in many different ways and in many different ranges of strength.
