My time with Franz Enzinger at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology

By a set of curious chances, Dr. F.M.Enzinger went from being captured as a prisoner of war by the American Army in Normandy in 1944 to become Head of the Soft Tissue Department of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington DC and a friend of one of the directors, Major General Joe M. Blumberg. The author relates how he worked under Enzinger from 1967 to 1970. Enzinger would review all the slides of referred consultation cases on alternate days and record his diagnoses on filing cards kept in his personal file which supplemented the computerised AFIP central file. Periodic reviews of the files allowed him to retrieve large numbers of recognised tumors and to study potential cases of previously undescribed entities. During his 31 years at the AFIP, Enzinger lectured widely, wrote numerous papers on recognised entities, co-authored with Dr. Sharon W. Weiss their famous text book and discovered the following 26 previously undefined soft tissue tumors: clear cell sarcoma, intramuscular myxoma, epithelioid sarcoma, extra-skeletal myxoid chondrosarcoma, fetal rhabdomyoma, extra-skeletal Ewing's sarcoma, spindle cell lipoma, fibroma of tendon sheath, angiomatoid (malignant) fibrous histiocytoma, cranial fasciitis of childhood, intravascular fasciitis, pleomorphic lipoma, neuromuscular hamartoma, epithelioid hemangioendothelioma, spindle cell hemangioma, fibro-osseous pseudotumor of the digits, plexiform fibrohistiocytic tumor, giant cell fibroblastoma as a juvenile form of dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans, ossifying fibromyxoid tumor, myolipoma of soft tissues, inflammatory fibrosarcoma, juxta-articular myxoma, atypical decubital fibroplasia, chondroid lipoma, sclerosing epithelioid fibrosarcoma, and lipofibromatosis. His last discovery, co-authored by some of his AFIP followers, was published in 2000. He died in 2006. The AFIP itself was "disestablished" only five years later, which will make it very difficult for any future pathologist to exceed Enzinger's astonishing record of 26 "new" tumor discoveries.