Leukemia was first reported in 1827 by a French physician who described a 63-year-old florist with clinical manifestations of fever, fatigue, urinary calculi, and hepatosplenomegaly. The term “leukemia” was first coined in 1847 by a famous German pathologist named Rudolf Weilzau to refer to this disease, meaning “disease of the white blood”.
It is well known that human blood is red in color (this is the color of red blood cells, which are far more numerous than the other two of the three blood cells). However, after the blood of a leukemia patient is centrifuged and sedimented, you can find a white sediment at the bottom of the tube that looks like sticky pus. In some cases, the blood looks white even without precipitation, due to an increase in abnormal white blood cells that are themselves “white” in color.
Modern medicine has found that not all patients with “leukemia” have an increase in abnormal peripheral blood leukemia cells at the time of initial diagnosis. Of course, sub(non)-leukemic leukemia can change to so-called classic leukemia with increased white blood cell counts as the disease progresses.
In addition, the subtypes of leukemia classification include “acute red leukemia (where the cells include both red and white blood cells)” and “acute megakaryocytic leukemia (where the cells are platelet-producing megakaryocytes). Therefore, the name “leukemia” does not cover all patients with this disease, and is not strictly accurate, but is only a convention.