On 15 June 1888, the German Emperor, Kaiser Friedrich III, died of @entity5 . Three biopsies of his laryngeal lesion had been taken by the British laryngologist, Morel Mackenzie, in 1887 and diagnosed by Rudolf Virchow as " @entity8711 ", confirming Mackenzie's assessment that the Kaiser's disease was benign. A fourth specimen coughed up by the @entity1 was considered by Virchow to be nondiagnostic. A further specimen expectorated by the @entity1 3  months before his death was diagnosed as @entity189 by Wilhelm Waldeyer. The autopsy revealed @entity957 in the larynx with a cervical lymph node @entity3 . The discrepancies between the initial diagnoses and the final outcome of the Kaiser's disease gave rise to a never-ending medical controversy. Our investigations on this historical case were limited to the official German documents and publications and their English translations and to subsequent literature sources of the time, after having received confirmation that the histological slides and Virchow's original reports had been lost. Based on current surgical pathology knowledge, we propose that the @entity5 that challenged the diagnostic skills of the founder of pathology was @entity189 ( @entity189 ), an extremely rare, metastasizing variant of @entity189 ( @entity189 ) composed of pure @entity189 mixed with clusters of @entity957 . As we see it now, Virchow was therefore not totally wrong. Our retrospective evaluation suggests that Virchow's detailed description of the Kaiser's @entity5 preceded the paper that contributed to the full understanding of @entity189 of the larynx by 110  years.

The Kaiser's XXXX revisited: was Virchow totally wrong?

@entity1 :: ('9606', 'Species') :: ['patient'] @entity5 :: ('MESH:D009369', 'Disease') :: ['laryngeal cancer', 'cancer', 'tumour'] @entity8711 :: ('MESH:D002862', 'Disease') :: ['pachydermia verrucosa laryngis'] @entity957 :: ('MESH:D002294', 'Disease') :: ['squamous carcinoma', 'conventional squamous cell carcinoma'] @entity189 :: ('MESH:D002277', 'Disease') :: ['hybrid verrucous carcinoma', 'HVC', 'verrucous carcinoma', 'carcinoma', 'VC'] @entity3 :: ('MESH:D009362', 'Disease') :: ['metastasis']
@entity5 :: (MESH:D009369,Disease) :: ['cancer']
