Chronic Myeloid Leukemia: An Historical Perspective

In 1845, Edinburgh pathologist John Hughes Bennett reported a “Case of Hypertrophy of the Spleen and Liver in which Death Took Place from Suppuration of the Blood” in the Edinburgh Medical Journal. Only a few weeks later, Rudolf Virchow in Berlin published a very similar case. Although one cannot know for sure, these two patients probably represent the first descriptions of the disease that later became known as chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). While Bennet thought that the patient had an infection, Virchow suspected a neoplastic disorder that he soon called white blood disease or leukemia. A dispute about the priority of the discovery arose, but was eventually settled cordially, when Virchow acknowledged Bennet’s priority and even wrote a letter to support his promotion. In 1872, Ernst Neumann observed that leukemia cells originated in the bone marrow. The next decades saw the differentiation into myeloid versus lymphoid and acute versus chronic leukemias.