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(Circulation. 2000;101:1874.)
© 2000 American Heart Association, Inc.

Special Report

Homage to James B. Herrick: A Contemporary Look at Myocardial Infarction and at Sickle-Cell Heart Disease

The 32nd Annual Herrick Lecture of the Council on Clinical Cardiology of the American Heart Association

Presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association’s Council on Clinical Cardiology, Atlanta, Ga, November 9, 1999.

Thomas N. James, MD

From the Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, and Department of Pathology, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston.

Correspondence to Thomas N. James, MD, University of Texas Medical Branch, 301 University Boulevard, Galveston, Texas 77555-0175.

Key Words: myocardial infarction • apoptosis • necrosis • anemia, sickle cell

	Introduction

 
For a clinical cardiologist, I know of no award more appreciated than selection for the Herrick Lecture. I express my personal gratitude to the Council on Clinical Cardiology for adding me to a long list of distinguished predecessors, among whom I realized to my amazement that every individual, living and dead, is one I have cherished as a personal friend. There are too few advantages to growing old, but realizations such as this are surely to be treasured. Ptolemy, who lived near the beginning of the millennium that we are now about to close, wrote, "As material fortune is associated with the properties of the body, so honor belongs to those of the soul."

James B. Herrick has become a revered figure not only in cardiology, but also in hematology. In fact, of his 2 historic contributions in medicine, the first came in 1910,¹ when he described the unusual sickle-shaped erythrocytes found in a blood smear from an anemic young black Caribbean dental student in Chicago. His more familiar (to us) landmark article about myocardial infarction came 2 years later, in 1912.² In it, he reported that myocardial infarction was not an inescapable tocsin of doom, but that it was often survived, sometimes with little lasting damage. Even today, there is too little appreciation that the complex causes of fatal myocardial infarction³ include many factors other than simply the occlusion of a coronary artery.

Both his sickle-cell article and the one on myocardial infarction were essentially "case reports," a category . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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