Results of Conservative Application of X-Ray Treatment in Chronic Leukemia

Forkner1has written It is now almost a hundred years since the classical description of leukemia yet today we know almost nothing about its cause or its specific treatment. The truth of this statement will be evident from even a brief review of the more recent literature on the subject or of almost any series of records of patients treated according to the customarily applied technics. The rather general tendency toward pessimism on the part of the medical profession in respect to the possible benefits to be derived from treatment of a patient with leukemia has developed, and is perhaps in part justifiable, because of the ineffectiveness of therapy in the acute and atypical leukemias which is assumed to apply to all leukemias and because of the failure of statistical studies of case records to have demonstrated that the life span of the patient with chronic leukemia has been