How it began
Denis Burkitt, an Irish surgeon, worked at Mulago Hospital and taught at Makerere College Medical School in Kampala from 1948 to 1964. In 1957 he examined a five-year-old boy with symmetrical swellings of the jaw. He reviewed similar cases and identified 41 children with jaw tumors, many of whom also had tumors of the adrenals, kidneys and liver. He published his observations in the British Journal of Surgery in 1958 as "A sarcoma involving the jaws in African children".
Before it existed
Burkitt was not the first to publish on the jaw tumors. Earlier reports had treated the swellings at different sites as separate conditions. He was the first to recognize that they were presentations of a single disease. Pathologist Jack Davies described the cells as strongly resembling lymphocytes.
How it works
Burkitt mapped the disease. He mailed more than 1,000 illustrated pamphlets and questionnaires to government and mission hospitals across Africa, and in October 1961 set off from Kampala on a 10,000-mile road trip to 56 hospitals. The cases fell in a belt across tropical Africa that matched the temperature and rainfall zones of malaria, which suggested that an insect-borne agent was involved.
What changed first
In March 1961 Burkitt lectured at Middlesex Hospital in London. Michael Anthony Epstein, in the audience, decided to look for a cancer-causing virus and arranged for tumor samples to be flown from Uganda. A sample from a nine-year-old girl in Kampala, delayed by fog in December 1963, yielded the first cell line grown from human lymphocytic cells, named EB after Epstein and Yvonne Barr.
What lasted
The disease was named Burkitt lymphoma in 1963 at a meeting of the International Union against Cancer in Paris. It is linked to the presence of a virus in people whose immune systems are weakened by chronic malaria, and it was the first cancer found to have a viral cause. Burkitt was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972.
