Selected items from the history of pathology.

Phillippe Charles Ernest Gaucher (1854-1918) described a case of the disease that bears his name in his 1882 thesis for the doctorate of medicine at Paris. His academic career continued in that city, and he rose through the ranks to professor of dermatology and syphilology, that appointment coming in 1902. The patient was a woman, and Gaucher remarks that she had neither ascites nor leukemia, just a very large spleen. He remarks on the rarity of any type of cancer of the spleen and then presents his "conclusions" as follows: