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Summary: Mesothelioma was discovered and recognized in 1960 when Dr. Wagner described 33 cases of mesothelioma occurring in South Africa. Discover how mesothelioma was finally linked to asbestos exposure with helpful information from a clinical professor in this free video on cancer.
Dr. William Hughson is a resident professor of occupational diseases at the University of California San Diego.read more
"My name is Dr. Bill Hughson a clinical professor of medicine at The University of California San Diego and I am the director of the UCSD Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. There are case reports from autopsies and pathologists describing tumors which were probably Mesothelioma dating back to the 1700's and the 1800's. However, modern pathology didn't develop until much later and in particular special stains were not developed until fairly recently. In fact as early as the 1920's, people were saying that there really was no such thing as a Mesothelioma. When they saw tumors at those locations they thought it's either a special type of lung cancer or it is a metastatic tumor arising from other organs. The modern history of Mesothelioma really begins in 1960 when Dr. Wagner published a paper describing 33 cases of Mesothelioma occurring in South Africa associated with blue asbestos. In the United States in the mid 1960's researchers from New York began to publish descriptions of Mesothelioma occurring in insulators who worked on the East Coast of the United States and in Canada and certainly within 10 or 15 years after that the association between asbestos and Mesothelioma was well understood."
eHow Article: Who Discovered Mesothelioma?