In 1857, under the title "A New Case of Leukemia," Friedrich1 described a case in which the disease, interpreted by him as leukemia, ran an acute course with high fever, pronounced hemorrhagic diathesis and terminated fatally within a short time. After Friedrich, Ebstein in 1889 observed a similar case and collected from the literature sixteen analogous cases. On the basis of his own observations and of the collected material, he defined the clinical and pathologico-anatomic picture of this disease and represented the acute leukemia as a distinct entity. Since that time reports of this disease from various countries have been published, but from the relative scarcity of the literature, including the American, it seems that the disease is decidedly rare as compared with chronic leukemia.
Children are affected with relative frequency, especially the male. In this country Thomas McCrae2 observed acute leukemia in a 3-year-old boy and collected