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The Rhesus Factor And Disease Prevention (Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine Vol 22)

by:?Doris Teichler Zallen, D. A. Christie, E. M. Tansey (Editors)   


  
The Rhesus Factor And Disease Prevention (Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine Vol 22)
by Doris Teichler Zallen (Editor), D. A. Christie (Editor), E. M. Tansey (Editor)  
??? * ISBN-10: 0854840990
??? * ISBN-13: 9780854840991
??? * Format: Paperback, 124pp
??? * Publisher: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine
??? * Pub. Date: December 2004
??? * Series: Welcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine
??? * Volume 22  

The prevention of rhesus disease of the newborn is a stunning medical success story. This disease afflicted thousands of newborns each year, causing serious health problems, even death. Yet from the early 1940s to the 1970s – British and American researchers uncovered the basis of the disease and developed the medical intervention that could prevent its occurrence. Many of the key steps leading to this remarkable achievement took place at the University of Liverpool School of Medicine. Chaired by Professor Sir David Weatherall, this Witness Seminar examines the factors that triggered these studies and the challenges that confronted scientists and clinicians; the intellectual, institutional, and social factors that guided the work; the crucial insights; and the vistas that the prevention of rhesus disease has opened in fetal medicine. Participants include Professor Robin Coombs, the late Professor Ronald Finn, Dr Nevin Hughes-Jones, Professor Patrick Mollison, Dr Archie Norman, Dr Derrick Tovey, Professor Charles Whitfield, Professor John Woodrow and Professor Doris Zallen.  
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?excerpt:
We are going to go through the history of the development of the rhesus factor story and before we start I would like to ask Doris Zallen to begin with a historical introduction. Professor Doris Zallen: I have been asked to give some historical context and raise some questions, and I will try to do all of that. When it comes to sorting out the history of a medical advance, it is always hard to know where to begin. But certainly a major historical landmark anchoring today’s discussion would have to be the work of Karl Landsteiner in 1900, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1930.
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Landsteiner discovered the existence of the ABO blood groups, the cell surface substances produced by genes that endow individuals with their individual blood types: A, B, O and AB.
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Landsteiner’s scientific finding was pressed into service. Clinically, of course, it resulted in safer blood transfusions in humans. Scientifically, it fuelled research efforts to find other such blood group systems. Initially, very few studies of the blood group factors took place in Britain. It wasn’t until the 1930s – when J B S Haldane began to use blood types as human traits in his population genetic studies and when R A Fisher took over the Galton Chair at UCL and set up a laboratory that focused on blood group research – that blood groups became an area of active research in the UK  
CONTENTS
Illustrations and credits?
Witness Seminars: Meetings and publications; Acknowledgements?
E M Tansey and D A Christie
Introduction
. Doris T Zallen?
Transcript
. Edited by D T Zallen, D A Christie and E M Tansey?
References?
Biographical notes?
Glossary?
Index?
Key to cover photographs                   direct link --> www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/witnesses.html
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