Abstract
The conceptual evolution in the field of soft tissue tumor pathology has been mostly driven by a relatively small group of individuals that includes giants of the past and the present such as James Ewing, Raffaele Lattes, Arthur Purdy Stout, Franz Enzinger, Sharon Weiss, Lennart Angervall, Harry Evans, Marku Miettinen, and Christopher Fletcher. Juan Rosai, not only exerted an immense impact on surgical pathology in general, but in consideration of his unique talent in identifying novel clinicopathologic entities, has also contributed remarkably to current understanding of mesenchymal neoplasms. The creation of desmoplastic small round cell tumor certainly ranks among his most relevant efforts, although he actually put his mark on a broad variety of soft tissue lesions, including vascular neoplasms. It would be impossible to include in a single article all the entities that he created or contributed to refine; therefore, this review is limited to a selection of what we believe represent true milestones.