In December 2020, the 62nd Annual Meeting of @ash_hematology #ASH20 will be “virtual” – a huge change from the previous 61 meetings. The first ASH annual meeting was in Atlantic City, New Jersey, April 1958. #HematologyTweetstory 29: how did ASH & the annual meeting come about?/1 
@BloodJournal came first! In 1941, Henry M. Stratton (1901-1984), a Jewish med student who immigrated to the US from Vienna via Havana in 1938, set up a publishing company called Grune & Stratton with a businessman named Ludwig H. Grunebaum. ("Grune" wasn’t involved for long)./2
Since he'd been a med student & briefly worked for a publisher in Cuba, Stratton mostly started medical journals. One was “Blood: The Journal of Hematology”; later simplified to “Blood.” Stratton needed an editor, so he called a friend at New England Medical Center for advice./3
The friend said Russian émigré William Dameshek (1900-1969) @TuftsMedicalCtr would be an ideal 1st editor for @BloodJournal. At the time, Dameshek was one of the two most prominent hematologists in the US (the other: Max Wintrobe in Utah). Stratton convinced Dameshek to do it./4
The first issue of @BloodJournal appeared January 1946; George Minot of pernicious anemia therapy fame, 1934 Nobel laureate, wrote 1st article (v1,p1). In 1947, Blood became a monthly journal. Early papers were heavy on red cells & plasma separation, light on heme malignancy./5
Blood didn’t become the official journal of @ASH_Hematology until 1976. Those interested in more of the history of @Bloodjournal might enjoy this 2015 article reviewing the journal's first 70 years by Barry Coller, physician-in-chief @RockefellerUniv./6 ashpublications.org/blood/article/…
Dameshek edited Blood for 23 years until his death during surgery in 1969, the longest term of any of the 12 editors. The shortest: Freddy Stohlmann’s; he was killed during the bombing of a TWA Flight 841 while returning from a hematology meeting in Tel Aviv in September 1974./7
In the 1940s, the Society of Clinical Investigation (now @the_asci, founded 1907) met annually in Atlantic City. A group of investigators interested in blood began to meet during SCI meetings; they called themselves, “The Blood Club", a “totally structureless, unformed” group./8
SCI were colloquially known as "Young Turks" because the upstart young investigators who were members rebelled against what they viewed as a “stuffy”, antiquated spirit in the “Old Turks”: the Association of American Physicians, founded in 1885 by William Osler & William Welch./9
SCI had resulted from a chance meeting of several scientists vacationing on the Atlantic City boardwalk during the summer of 1907. So their annual meeting was always held at the Chalfone-Haddon Hall Hotel in Atlantic City, which still exists as part of Resorts Casino Hotel./10
Henry Stratton went to SCI in 1946 (SCI meeting summary below) & listened in on a Blood Club meeting. He loved what he heard. "This is so good, it's got to be formalized. You've got to have a real Society of Hematology." But members were reluctant; they liked the informality./11
It was an era of new hematology societies. Societe Francaise dHematologie (SFH) began 1931, Japanese Society of Hematology (JSH) in 1937. An International Society of Hematology (ISH) formed in 1946; the first meetings were in Dallas and Mexico City. BSH came a bit later: 1960./12
In 1954, ISH met in Paris & Dameshek was elected President. ISH held its 6th meeting at the Somerset Hotel in Boston in 1956. During that meeting, 10 US hematologists had an informal lunch & decided the time had come for an American Society of Hematology: “We need to do this!"/13
Incidentally, like the Chalfonte in Atlantic City, the Somerset Hotel in Boston is still there, on Commonwealth Ave & Charlesgate East. Now it is condominiums. Red Sox great Ted Williams stayed there during the baseball season, renting the same room for many years./14
One problem that nascent hematology societies in the 1940s-1950s had was that no one could decide what a hematologist was. There were European professors of h(a)ematology like Sir Lionel Whitby, Jean Bernard or Paul Chevalier, but US academic/clinical structure was different/15
Undaunted, one of the hematologists who attended ISH 6, James Tullis, put an ad in Blood: "If anyone is interested, we tentatively plan to have an organizational meeting at the Harvard Club in 1957 to precede one day before the meeting of the American College of Physicians."/16
Somehow this thread got 'broken' - Twitter technical glitch. It continues with some stories about how the annual meeting has evolved since 1958./17
