Similar to most medical discoveries, there exists a dispute over the first person to actually discover leukemia. Certain sources have claimed Dr. Alfred Velpeau primarily discovered and proceeded to accurately describe leukemia in the year 1827. He has technically been credited with discovering the disease because his autopsy regarding a particular patient was an accurate description of leukemia, although no name was assigned to this condition at the time. The patient was 63 years old and had a fever, a swollen stomach, as well as being generally weak. The premature death of the patient after being attended to by the doctor necessitated the autopsy, which revealed the man’s spleen was twenty times larger than normal with a mixture of blood and pus. This discovery was unknowingly the earliest accurate description of leukemia.
Alfred Donné is a French doctor who was also credited with giving the earliest accurate description of this cancerous disease in 1844 through a publication where he referred to the disease as unknown. However, John Hughes Benett, an English physician gave the first official diagnosis of leukemia in 1845 as a blood-related disease. The reference to Benett as primarily discovering leukemia is solely based on this reason. He referred to this condition as leucocythaemia and published various case study series on leukemia in 1851.
