Conditions associated with sickling and their laboratory diagnosis

Abstract

The sickle cell abnormality entered into medicine in 1910 when Herrick found "peculiar elongated and sickle-shaped red corpuscles" in the peripheral smears of blood from a severely anaemic West Indian negro student. It appears that a similar sickling of erythrocytes was noted in some blood films of deer in the London Zoo as early as 1840, and presumably in these instances, as is now known to be the case in erythrocytes which can assume this shape in human beings, the abnormality is due to the peculiar solubility properties of the haemoglobin present inside the eryth rocytes.