Orginalny
The history of ITP is closely tied to the story of the first demonstration of a blood plasma factor which causes platelet destruction. It was this blood plasma factor that was subsequently identified as an autoantibody. This initial dramatic experiment is part of the legend of ITP, and it is graphically described in a book by Lawrence K. Altman, the medical writer for the New York Times.
He described the story of Dr. William Harrington, whose career research on ITP began when he was a medical student in Boston in 1945 and cared for a young woman with ITP who died from hemorrhage. Five years later, when he was receiving his hematology training at Washington University in St. Louis, he was caring for another woman with severe bleeding, whose platelet count had not increased after splenectomy