James B. Herrick - Medical Discoveries

Medical Discoveries

Herrick studied and taught at various Chicago hospitals. His first discovery, in 1904, was that of sickle-shaped red blood cells on the blood film of a medical student from Grenada. Herrick's description of the student's disease was known for many years as Herrick's syndrome, and is now known as sickle-cell disease. The condition is prevalent in West Africa.

Herrick's second major contribution was a landmark article on myocardial infarction ("heart attack") in JAMA in 1912. He proposed that thrombosis in the coronary artery leads to the symptoms and abnormalities of heart attacks and that this was not inevitably fatal. While Herrick was not the first to propose this, ultimately his article was the most influential, although at the time it received only limited attention. In 1918 he was one of the first to encourage electrocardiography in the diagnosis of myocardial infarction.

Herrick is not closely associated with genetics, but his discoveries turned out to be inherited traits, so his contributions pointed other researchers toward genetically-based conditions.