Radio Shows | A History of Red Blood Cells | mp3 … wma … wav

Red blood cells are essential to life but of course we didn't always know that. In fact the first people to discover and study red blood cells thought they were unimportant.

Today looking at red blood cells can tell you if you have an infection, what kind it is and even if you have cancer. We've come a long way in our knowledge of these life sustaining cells.

The first person to describe and draw red blood cells after studying them under a microscope was Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1695. But neither he nor those immediately after him thought they had much value.

It was William Hewson who posthumously published that, because red blood cells were in such abundance, they had to be important. This earned him the title "the father of hematology."

We do have lots of red blood cells, about 25 trillion to be exact. That's half of all the cells in our body. But there are more than red blood cells in our blood.

Gabriel Andral, a French professor, and William Addison an English doctor both reported the first descriptions of white blood cells.

Finally, there's a third element in blood which was discovered by another French researcher, Alfred Donné. He identified platelets which are key to blood clotting after an injury. Platelets make up only a tiny volume of the blood.. a mere teaspoon.

All of these discoveries were great for basic science but they didn't hold much diagnostic value.

That is until 1879 when Paul Ehrlich published a quick and easy technique for studying blood. It's used to this day when your doctor orders a differential cell count. In this technique, the blood smear is stained and examined under a microscope.

The number and types of cells in the blood can indicate disease and infection. Today it is an important tool doctors use daily in diagnosing their patients.

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