On the day after Christmas, 1904, Walter Clement Noel staggered into Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago, suffering from respiratory distress. An intern, Ernest Irons, carried out routine tests on Noel’s blood, stool, and urine. The patient’s blood contained “many pear-shaped and elongated forms,” Irons noted. Over the next two and a half years, Irons and his supervisor, James Herrick, attended to Noel, an international student from the West Indies island of Grenada, for symptoms ranging from fever to arthritis to anemia. In 1910, Herrick published the first paper reporting on Noel’s condition, a case of what would come to be known as sickle cell anemia.
By the early 1900s, researchers had been looking through microscope lenses at microbes and other small structures for centuries. Yet the condition that chemist Linus Pauling called the “first molecular disease” went unmentioned and unidentified for years. “Why did it take a foreign patient for us ...
