Since Thomas Hodgkin's1 report in 1832 of 7 cases in which there was presented a syndrome of swelling of the superficial lymph nodes and enlargement of the liver and spleen with anemia, followed by cachexia and death, many similar reports have appeared in the literature. Hodgkin did not affix a name to the disease; this was left to Wilks,2 who in 1865 recorded 15 similar cases and applied the name Hodgkin's disease. Not all of Hodgkin's original 7 cases are considered to present true examples of the disease. Wilks,2 Reed,3 Halsted4 and Fox5 expressed the opinion that only 2 to 4 of the cases offer true examples of the disease process, the others being cases of tuberculosis, syphilis and leukemia.
The monumental work of Sternberg6 (1898) and Reed3 (1902) did much to clarify the histologic picture and pathologic behavior of the disease.