Research on mesothelioma
In the 1700s, it was the French pathologic anatomist Joseph Lieutaud who first described a tumor in the chest wall. Into the 1800s critics kept on rejecting the existence of pleural cancer, insisting that the tumors were secondary and that a primary tumor had to exist elsewhere in the body.
In 1854 pathologist von Rokitansky was the first to discover peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare cancer affecting the abdominal cavity lining. It was only in 1920 that the word ‘mesothelioma’ was first used by pathologists who described a tumor as ‘primary mesothelioma of the pleura’. The name gained popularity from here on.
The link between mesothelioma and asbestos exposure was already suspected to exist for a while, when in 1960 a seminal paper was published that confirmed the link between the two.