Discovery
in 1658 Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam was the first person to observe red blood cells under a microscope and in 1695, microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, also Dutch, was the first to draw an illustration of "red corpuscles", as they were called. No further blood cells were discovered until 1842 when French physician Alfred Donné discovered platelets. The following year leukocytes were first observed by Gabriel Andral, a French professor of medicine, and William Addison, a British physician, simultaneously. Both men believed that both red and white cells were altered in disease. With these discoveries, hematology, a new field of medicine, was established. Even though agents for staining tissues and cells were available, almost no advances were made in knowledge about the morphology of blood cells until 1879, when Paul Ehrlich published his technique for staining blood films and and his method for differential blood cell counting
Read more about this topic: Blood Cell
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)
“Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“The gain is not the having of children; it is the discovery of love and how to be loving.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)