Symposium on Hodgkin's Disease

It has been almost 150 years since Dr. Hodgkin described the condition of patients who exhibited the characteristic features of the syndrome that bears his name. The multinucleated cells, which are pathognomonic of Hodgkin's disease, were described by Dr. Dorothy Reed 70 years thereafter. Another 40 years elapsed before Jackson and Parker proposed a histological classification of Hodgkin's disease, which was used until about six years ago when Drs. Lukes, Butler, and Hicks reported the results of their meticulous examinations of Hodgkin's tissue, and devised the histological classification that is currently applied to the study of patients with this disease. Since World War II, the pace of progress in the investigation and understanding of Hodgkin's disease has accelerated to the point that the quality of care of patients has improved dramatically.

These developments include the histologic classification of Hodgkin's disease based upon the lymphocyte content of the lesions, the recognition