Abstract 845 Historical Perspectives Poster Symposium, Saturday, 5/1

Exactly 100 years ago, in April 1899, the German Surgeon/Pathologist Dr. Carl Max Wilhelm Wilms (1867-1918) provided a thorough review of the literature on childhood renal cancers, identifying nephroblastoma, or Wilms tumor as it has been called since, as a separate disease entity. Childhood renal tumors had been described prior to Wilms' publication, for example by Rance in 1814, Gairdner in 1828 (bilateral renal tumor), West in 1850, and Van der Bijl in 1856. The first well-documented histologic description of Wilms tumor was presented by Eberth in 1872 (bilateral case). Subsequently, Hansen in 1873 (bilateral), Cohnheim in 1875 (bilateral), and Kocher and Langhans in 1878 all reported this malignancy. In 1894, five years prior to Wilms' monograph, the German pathologist Birch-Hirschfeld, in collaboration with his countryman and Gynecologist/Obstetrician Doderlein, was the first to recognize that a number of different terms all had been used to describe the same tumor. For a brief period of time, in the German literature, this tumor was known as Birch-Hirschfeld tumor. However, Dr. Wilms was the first to recognize that all tissues present in the tumor developed from the same germ cell. In doing so, he unified morphologically diverse tumors, a concept that has not changed over the years, not even in view of recent molecular studies suggesting the involvement of multiple genetic loci in the development of this childhood cancer. The monograph "Die Mischgeschwulste der Niere" became much quoted in the literature and eventually connected the author's name to the disease, resulting in the eponym Wilms tumor.