Discovery
Although red blood cells had been known since van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), the German anatomist Max Schultze (1825–1874) was the first to describe platelets. He described "spherules" that were much smaller than red blood cells and that occasionally clumped and were found in collections of fibrous material.
Giulio Bizzozero (1846–1901), building on Schultze's findings, used "living circulation" to study blood cells of amphibians microscopically in vivo. He is especially noted for discovering that platelets clump at the site of blood vessel injury, a process that precedes the formation of a blood clot. This observation confirmed the role of platelets in coagulation.
Read more about this topic: Platelet
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)