A note from history: The discovery of blood cells.

Abstract

Naked-eye inspection of blood at phlebotomy was practiced far back to ancient times. Invention of the compound microscope in Holland around 1590 by Hans and Zacharias Jannsen made possible the examination of the content of the blood. In 1658, the Dutch naturalist, Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680) was the first person to observe red blood cells under the microscope. Another Dutch microscopist, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), who was an acquaintance of Swammerdam, described the size and shape of “red corpuscles” and rendered the first illustration of them in 1695 (Fig. 1) [1]. During the next 150 years if anybody looked at blood at all under the microscope, nothing other than the “red corpuscles” were seen. Gabriel Andral (1797–1876), a French professor of medicine, and William Addison (1802–1881), an English country practitioner, reported simultaneously the first descriptions of leukocytes (1843); both concluded that the red as well as the white globules of the blood were altered in disease [2,3]. Addison also deduced that pus cells were blood leukocytes that had passed through the wall of capillary vessels. Physicians in France and England made landmark discoveries in the mid 1800s that established the foundations of a new field in medicine: hematology. Alfred Donne (1801–1878) a French public health physician who in 1837 discovered and illustrated Trichomonas vaginalis in vaginal secretion of Parisien prostitutes, was an avid microscopist [4]. In 1842, he discovered a third element, the platelets, in blood [5]. Despite indifference and often even open hostility by his colleagues, Donne gave evening classes in medical microscopy (the first microscopic workshops in medicine) that attracted French as well as foreign students. One of Donne’s foreign students was John Hughes Bennett (1812–1875), a physician from Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied with Donne for a couple of years and, while in Paris, he helped to found the Medical Society of Paris and became its first president. In 1841, shortly after returning to Edinburgh, Bennett published a book on the use of the microscope for the diagnosis of diseases [6]. In 1845, Bennett in Scotland and Rudolph Virchow (1821–1902) in Germany simultaneously reported detailed descriptions of the blood cells in leukemia [7,8]. Virchow gave the condition its present name, leukemia. At this point in medical history, despite the fact that iodine, suffron, and ammonia carmine were available for staining tissues and cells, practically no advances were made in knowledge about the morphology of blood cells. The state of hematology from the 1850s to the 1870s was delineated by Lionel Beale (1828–1906), a British professor of physiology, pathology, and medicine, in a book [9] that went through several editions. Beale illustrated and described “the various corpuscles met within healthy Fig 1. Illustration of “red corpuscles” of blood by A van Leeuwenhoek (Letter 42 of Arcana Natura, 1695) [1].

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