Lowenhaupt's embryology-based classification of thymic tumors and the concept of granulomatous thymoma

✍ Scribed by Juan Rosai

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 133 KB
• Volume: 82
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0008-543X
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0142(19980401)82:7<1209::aid-cncr1>3.0.co;2-a

✦ Synopsis

are the following: 1) the information she provided on the status of the knowledge in the field at the time, 2) the conceptual approach she used for her iconoclastic new classification, and 3) the championing of the theory that a certain type of tumor involving the thymus and resembling Hodgkin's disease was actually a form of thymoma. Let's analyze these three aspects of the article separately.

Status of the Knowledge of Thymic Tumors in the Late 1940s

The author begins her article by stating, ''Thymic tumors, because As Cancer commemorates 50 years of of their rarity and diversity, have long resisted attempts at rational continuous publication, this article is one classification,'' and adds that ''it is impossible to reach valid concluof a series of summaries on the current sions from [the] variously described and variously interpreted matestatus of some of the oncologic issues rerial'' available at the time in the literature. Too often, then and now, ported in the first volume in 1948.

medical articles begin with a similar type of disparaging remark about the past, probably with the aim of luring the reader to expect that this sorry state of affairs will immediately vanish after the article in question is read. The truth is that, in most such instances, things were not as terrible as claimed and did not get much better afterwards. In the case of thymic tumors, however, one has to admit that the situation was just as dismal as described by Lowenhaupt. She makes her point convincingly by discussing the classification of thymic tumors of James Ewing as if it were the standard of the time, which was probably the case. It is noteworthy that Ewing also started both his article on the subject 2 and the chapter on ''The Thymus and Its Tu-

The author expresses his gratitude to Drs. Wermors'' of his book Neoplastic Diseases: A Treatise on Tumors 3 with the