Whipple's Disease - History

History

Whipple described the disease in 1907 in a paper in the now-defunct Bulletin of Johns Hopkins Hospital. The patient was a 36-year old medical missionary. Whipple referred to the disease as "intestinal lipodystrophy". It was long presumed to be an infectious disease, but the causative organism was only fully identified in 1992. In 2003, doctors from Johns Hopkins Hospital, together with a French expert in the disease, applied novel diagnostic methods to stored tissue samples from Whipple's original patient, and demonstrated T. whipplei in these tissues.

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