Herrick, James Bryan

Herrick, James Bryan

(born Aug. 11, 1861, Oak Park, Ill., U.S.—died March 7, 1954, Chicago) U.S. physician and clinical cardiologist. He received his M.D. from Rush Medical College. His case report on a black patient with anemia included the first description of the crescent-shaped erythrocytes characteristic of sickle-cell anemia, later shown to be the precipitating factor of the disease. Herrick was also the first to identify and describe coronary thrombosis.

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Herrick, James Bryan 

Born Aug. 11, 1861, in Oak Park, 111.; died Mar. 7, 1954, buried in Dorset, Vt. American internist.

Herrick graduated from the University of Michigan in 1882. He received his medical degree at Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1888 and was a professor there from 1900 to 1927. In 1910, Herrick described a specific form of anemia, which was subsequently called sickle-cell anemia. He gave a classical description of the symptoms of thromboses of the coronary artery (after V. P. Obraztsov and N. D. Strazhesko) and differentiated between the clinical pictures of coronary thrombosis and angina pectoris (1912), laying the basis for the current understanding of myocardial infarctions. Herrick was the first, in 1919, to describe the electrocardiographic changes in a person with coronary thrombosis. Herrick was president of the Association of American Physicians in 1923 and 1930. He was also an honorary member of the New York Academy of Medicine.

WORKS

“Peculiar Elongated and Sickle-shaped Red Blood Corpuscules in a Case of Severe Anemia.” Archives of Internal Medicine, 1910, vol. 6, no. 5, pp. 517–21.
“Clinical Features of Sudden Obstruction of the Coronary Arteries.” The Journal of the American Medical Association, 1912, vol. 59, no. 23, pp. 2015–20.
A Short History of Cardiology. Springfield-Baltimore, 1942.
Memories of Eighty Years. Chicago, 1949.

V. I. BORODULIN