The blood of the insane.

Full Abstract

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).

Author information

Author/s: Noll, Richard (R);

Affiliation: DeSales University, 2755 Station Avenue, Center Valley, PA 18034-9568, USA. Richard.Noll(-atsign-)desales.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Historical Article; Journal Article

Journal: History of psychiatry (Hist Psychiatry), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Dec; vol 17 (issue 68 Pt 4) : pp 395-418

Dates: Created 2007/03/05; Completed 2007/04/10;

PMID: 17333671, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

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