2009/03/24 by David G. James · 1 citation
Medicine · #Lymphoma Diagnosis and Treatment #Lymphadenopathy Diagnosis and Analysis #Portrait #Notice #Medicine #Colonialism #History #Family medicine #Art history #Political science #Law
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcn167
openalex publication_date 2009/03/24 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The meeting was the weekly medical and surgical staff conference held on Wednesday, 22 March 1961, at 5.15 p.m. in the Courtauld Lecture Theatre of the Middlesex Hospital, London W1. It was the routine weekly staff meeting of Professor Alan Kekwick's Department of Medicine, but this one turned out to be memorable. The notice board poster stated that Mr D.P. Burkitt, Makerere College, Uganda would talk on ‘The commonest children's cancer in Tropical Africa: a hitherto unrecognised cancer’. Denis Burkitt (1911–93) was an Ulster graduate of Trinity College, Dublin in 1935 and FRCS (Ed) in 1938. He served with the RAMC in East Africa during World War II, and afterwards in the Colonial Medical Service in Uganda. His astute foot-slogging epidemiological surveys provided a vivid profile of a previously unrecognized lymphoid cancer in African children.1 He postulated that a biological agent, possible an oncogenic virus was spread by a climate-dependent arthropod vector.