Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura - History

History

After initial reports by the Portuguese physician Amato Lusitano in 1556 and Lazarus de la Rivière (physician to the King of France) in 1658, it was the German physician and poet Paul Gottlieb Werlhof who in 1735 wrote the most complete initial report of the purpura of ITP. Platelets were unknown at the time. The name "Werlhof's disease" was used more widely before the current descriptive name became more popular. Platelets were described in the early 19th century, and in the 1880s several investigators linked the purpura with abnormalities in the platelet count. The first report of a successful therapy for ITP was in 1916, when a young Polish medical student, Paul Kaznelson, described a female patient's response to a splenectomy. Splenectomy remained a first-line remedy until the introduction of steroid therapy in the 1950s.