The blood of the insane.
The history of serological investigations of the blood of the insane is traced from the initial such study in 1854 by a solitary Scottish asylum physician, who counted the blood cells of his lunatic patients under a weak microscope, to the January 2005 announcement by an international team of geneticists of the development of a genomic blood test that can differentially diagnose schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The story of the first claim of the development of a blood test for madness in 1912--the Abderhalden defensive ferments reaction test--is related in detail. Studies of the blood of the insane have followed four general methodological paradigms: the corpuscular richness paradigm (1854); the metabolic paradigm (c. 1895); the immunoserodiagnostic paradigm (1906); and the medical genomics paradigm (2005).
Noll
Richard
R
DeSales University, 2755 Station Avenue, Center Valley, PA 18034-9568, USA. Richard.Noll@desales.edu
D001714:Bipolar Disorder / Q000097:blood / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000266:history; D001774:Blood Chemical Analysis; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D006403:Hematologic Tests / Q000266:history; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000097:blood* / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000266:history*; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000097:blood / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000266:history; D012698:Serologic Tests / Q000266:history