href="#litres_trial_promo">*
It would have been a perfectly satisfactory explanation except that Bennett could not find a source for the pus. During the necropsy, he pored carefully through the body, combing the tissues and organs for signs of an abscess or wound. But no other stigmata of infection were to be found. The blood had apparently spoiled—suppurated—of its own will, combusted spontaneously into true pus. “A suppuration of blood,” Bennett called his case. And he left it at that.
Bennett was wrong, of course, about his spontaneous “suppuration” of blood. A little over four months after Bennett had described the slater’s illness, a twenty-four-year-old German researcher, Rudolf Virchow, independently published16 a case report with striking similarities to Bennett’s case. Virchow’s patient was a cook in her midfifties. White cells had explosively overgrown her blood, forming dense and pulpy pools in her spleen. At her autopsy, pathologists had likely not even needed a microscope to distinguish the thick, milky layer of white cells floating above the red.
Virchow, who knew of Bennett’s case, couldn’t bring himself to believe Bennett’s theory. Blood, Virchow argued, had no reason to transform impetuously into anything. Moreover, the unusual symptoms bothered him: What of the massively enlarged spleen? Or the absence of any wound or source of pus in the body? Virchow began to wonder if the blood itself was abnormal. Unable to find a unifying explanation for it, and seeking a name for this condition17, Virchow ultimately settled for weisses Blut—white blood—no more than a literal description of the millions of white cells he had seen under his microscope. In 1847, he changed the name to the more academic-sounding “leukemia”—from leukos, the Greek word for “white.”
Renaming the disease—from the florid “suppuration of blood” to the flat weisses Blut—hardly seems like an act of scientific genius, but it had a profound impact on the understanding of leukemia. An illness, at the moment of its discovery, is a fragile idea, a hothouse flower—deeply, disproportionately influenced by names and classifications. (More than a century later, in the early 1980s, another change in name18—from gay related immune disease (GRID) to acquired immuno deficiency syndrome (AIDS)—would signal an epic shift in the understanding of that disease.*) Like Bennett, Virchow didn’t understand leukemia. But unlike Bennett, he didn’t pretend to understand it. His insight lay entirely in the negative. By wiping the slate clean of all preconceptions, he cleared the field for thought.
The humility of the name (and the underlying humility about his understanding of cause) epitomized Virchow’s approach to medicine19. As a young professor at the University of Würzburg, Virchow’s work soon extended far beyond naming leukemia. A pathologist by training, he launched a project that would occupy him for his life: describing human diseases in simple cellular terms.
It was a project born of frustration. Virchow entered medicine in the early 1840s, when nearly every disease was attributed to the workings of some invisible force: miasmas, neuroses, bad humors, and hysterias. Perplexed by what he couldn’t see, Virchow turned with revolutionary zeal to what he could see: cells under the microscope. In 1838, Matthias Schleiden, a botanist, and Theodor Schwann, a physiologist, both working in Germany, had claimed that all living organisms were built out of fundamental building blocks called cells. Borrowing and extending this idea, Virchow set out to create a “cellular theory” of human biology, basing it on two fundamental tenets. First, that human bodies (like the bodies of all animals and plants) were made up of cells. Second, that cells only arose from other cells—omnis cellula e cellula, as he put it.
The two tenets might have seemed simplistic, but they allowed Virchow to propose a crucially important hypothesis about the nature of human growth. If cells only arose from other cells, then growth could occur in only two ways: either by increasing cell numbers or by increasing cell size. Virchow called these two modes hyperplasia and hypertrophy. In hypertrophy, the number of cells did not change; instead, each individual cell merely grew in size—like a balloon being blown up. Hyperplasia, in contrast, was growth by virtue of cells increasing in number. Every growing human tissue could be described in terms of hypertrophy and hyperplasia. In adult animals, fat and muscle usually grow by hypertrophy. In contrast, the liver, blood, the gut, and the skin all grow through hyperplasia—cells becoming cells becoming more cells, omnis cellula e cellula e cellula.
That explanation was persuasive, and it provoked a new understanding not just of normal growth, but of pathological growth as well. Like normal growth, pathological growth could also be achieved through hypertrophy and hyperplasia. When the heart muscle is forced to push against a blocked aortic outlet, it often adapts by making every muscle cell bigger to generate more force, eventually resulting in a heart so overgrown that it may be unable to function normally—pathological hypertrophy.
Conversely, and importantly for this story, Virchow soon stumbled upon the quintessential disease of pathological hyperplasia—cancer. Looking at cancerous growths through his microscope, Virchow discovered an uncontrolled growth of cells—hyperplasia in its extreme form. As Virchow examined the architecture of cancers, the growth often seemed to have acquired a life of its own, as if the cells had become possessed by a new and mysterious drive to grow. This was not just ordinary growth, but growth redefined, growth in a new form. Presciently (although oblivious of the mechanism) Virchow called it neoplasia—novel, inexplicable, distorted growth, a word that would ring through the history of cancer.*
By the time Virchow died in 1902, a new theory of cancer had slowly coalesced out of all these observations. Cancer was a disease of pathological hyperplasia in which cells acquired an autonomous will to divide. This aberrant, uncontrolled cell division created masses of tissue (tumors) that invaded organs and destroyed normal tissues. These tumors could also spread from one site to another, causing outcroppings of the disease—called metastases—in distant sites, such as the bones, the brain, or the lungs. Cancer came in diverse forms—breast, stomach, skin, and cervical cancer, leukemias and lymphomas. But all these diseases were deeply connected at the cellular level. In every case, cells had all acquired the same characteristic: uncontrollable pathological cell division.
With this understanding, pathologists who studied leukemia in the late 1880s now circled back to Virchow’s work. Leukemia, then, was not a suppuration of blood, but neoplasia of blood. Bennett’s earlier fantasy20 had germinated an entire field of fantasies among scientists, who had gone searching (and dutifully found) all sorts of invisible parasites and bacteria bursting out of leukemia cells. But once pathologists stopped looking for infectious causes and refocused their lenses on the disease, they discovered the obvious analogies between leukemia cells and cells of other forms of cancer. Leukemia was a malignant proliferation of white cells in the blood. It was cancer in a molten, liquid form.
With that seminal observation, the study of leukemias suddenly found clarity and spurted forward. By the early 1900s, it was clear that the disease came in several forms. It could be chronic and indolent, slowly choking the bone marrow and spleen, as in Virchow’s original case (later termed chronic leukemia). Or it could be acute and violent, almost a different illness in its personality, with flashes of fever, paroxysmal fits of bleeding, and a dazzlingly rapid overgrowth of cells—as in Bennett’s patient.
This second version of the disease, called acute leukemia, came in two further subtypes, based on the type of cancer cell involved. Normal white cells in the blood can be broadly divided into two types of cells—myeloid cells or lymphoid cells. Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) was a cancer of the myeloid cells. Acute lymphoblastic
