Discovery of Sickle Cell Anemia

An American doctor, R. Lebby, wrote the first modern description of sickle cell anemia in 1846 in an article titled ‘Case of Absence of the Spleen.’

The next published reports of sickle cell disease were in African medical articles. These articles started to appear in the 1870s. Scientists then began to look for causes of the disease.

With the development and increased use of the microscope in medicine and the birth of the medical specialty of hematology, the study of blood and its disorder it did not take long to discover that not all red blood cells are similar perfectly shaped.

In 1910 Dr. James B Herrick, an American physician published his report about his patient Clement Noel’s illness. This marked the first account of sickle cell anemia in Western medical literature.

He is credited for his description of sickle cell disease. The discovery was announced in a presentation at the 25th annual meeting of the Association of American Physicians on the morning of May 5, 1910. It was published soon thereafter in the November issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

In 1917, Victor Emmel, another American doctor, treated an African American woman for anemia. Emmel looked at the woman’s blood under a microscope and saw many sickle cells.

Dr. Verne R. Mason published a report about the patient in 1922. He gave the new disease a name sickle cell anemia. He stressed that the disease was inherited.

Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize Winner helped to discover that sickle cell anemia is caused by an alteration in the hemoglobin protein’s molecular structure. His paper reporting this discovery, ‘Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease’, was published in Science in 1949.
Discovery of Sickle Cell Anemia