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David Steensma, MD

@DavidSteensma

5 Jul

https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/1411703123501064194

It is often said that Marie Skłodowska-Curie died of "aplastic anemia." Try Googling it; you'll find many hits. But I am not so sure. She died on July 4th, 1934, at a sanatorium called Sancellemoz, in Passy, Haute-Savoie, France, after a long illness. #aplasticanemia #MDS /1

https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/1411703123501064194

@UNIGEnews

The 1937 biography by her younger daughter Ève describes her final illness, including a consultation at Sancellemoz (postcard) by a "Professor Roch." That would have been Maurice Roch, Regent of @UNIGEnews & father of famous Alpinist André Roch who planned Aspen, Colorado./3

Here is how the daughter's biography describes that consultation. Mention is made of fevers and blood tests - rapidly falling WBC & RBC counts - and that X-rays were done. (The last thing she needed: more radiation!). Diagnosis: "Pernicious anaemia in its extreme form." /3

Read 14 tweets

David Steensma, MD

@DavidSteensma

31 Mar

@starwars

What is “Bloodburn”? In the @starwars Universe, this mysterious chronic hematologic condition led Greer Sonnel - Senator Leia Organa’s chief of staff - to quit spaceship racing. #HematologyTweetstory 36: hematologic changes from space travel, in fantasy & reality. Image:@NASA/1

@WookOfficial

First, some sci-fi fun. #StarWars fandom source “Wookipedia” (@WookOfficial, source of below image) tells us Bloodburn is a “rare, chronic, and often terminal illness of the blood that befell (often younger) starship pilots”. Symptoms include fevers... /2 starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bloodburn

Bloodburn is incurable, but usually manageable with good diet, hydration, rest, & “hadeira serum” injections (the serum itself can be harmful). The pathophysiology of Bloodburn is unclear. The “burn” part suggests radiation mediated-injury, but maybe just refers to the fevers?/3

Read 39 tweets

David Steensma, MD

@DavidSteensma

1 Dec 20

Aspirin continues to be the most widely used anti-platelet agent, 125 years after its synthesis. But where did it come from - and why do we give it in such weird doses (e.g. 81, 162 & 325 mg) – at least in the United States? #HematologyTweetstory 35 will answer these questions./1

Some lucky ancient person serendipitously discovered that willow bark & leaves relieved pain. Hippocrates used tea made from willow leaf to ease childbirth, while the Egyptian Ebers papyrus (~1500 BCE) mentions willow for aches and pains. (Images: Sermo/Pharmaceutical Journal)/2

@royalsociety

In 1763, @royalsociety published a study of dried willow bark for rheumatism, submitted by Edward Stone (1702-1768), a vicar from Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds & fellow @WadhamOxford. Back then a lot of “natural philosophy” (early science) was done by Anglican clergy./ 3

Read 63 tweets

David Steensma, MD

@DavidSteensma

26 Oct 20

#HematologyTweetstory 34: Vitamin K. This tale includes 2 larger-than-life characters, self experimentation, & bloody cows. Also, yours truly was once *so* dedicated to hematology history that he drove to rural Wisconsin to search local property records related to this story.😉/1

Melilotus: a genus of grassland plants originally from Eurasia, also known as “sweet clover” because of a vanilla-like scent (though the taste is bitter). Sweet clover was first brought to the US & Canada during the Colonial period, and became a useful farm animal feed./2

In the winter of 1921 - a particularly damp season across the upper Midwest - farmers from Wisconsin to the Dakotas, from Ontario to Alberta, had cattle bleed to death. Many calves born the following spring were stillborn & deformed, as if they'd been exposed to a teratogen./3

Read 40 tweets

David Steensma, MD

@DavidSteensma

12 Oct 20

#HematologyTweetstory 33: hemoglobin variants, often said to be the most common single-gene genetic disorders in humans. “Disorders” is not entirely accurate, as many variants are clinically silent. We’ll focus on hemoglobinopathies; thalassemias are a story for another time./1

@MayoProceedings

I got interested in this ~20 years ago & wrote a paper in 2001 @MayoProceedings about RBC disorders we'd incidentally noted in some of the many patients we saw @MayoClinic from the Middle East (esp. prior to 9/11). I then went to @MRC_WIMM in Oxford to a globin lab for 2 years./2

First, a quick run-through of the normal hemoglobins (image source: Hoffbrand and Steensma, Essential Haematology, 8th edition). Already in the 19th century it was recognized that there was more than one type of human hemoglobin. /3

Read 40 tweets

David Steensma, MD

@DavidSteensma

8 Oct 20

@MayoClinic

#HematologyTweetstory 32: lymph nodes with names. There’s also a major personal announcement in this thread. We each have lots of lymph nodes: an estimated 500-600 (Image: @MayoClinic). Like stars, they cluster. (Did you ever think of your axilla as a lymphatic “galaxy”?)🙂/1

@MayoClinic

One of the best known eponymous nodes is the “Sister Mary Joseph nodule”, named after the gifted woman born Julia Dempsey (1856-1939), who was Dr Will Mayo’s scrub nurse @MayoClinic and, as a Sister of Saint Francis, directed St Marys Hospital in Rochester, MN for 46 years./2

@MayoProceedings

When she scrubbed abdomens before laparotomies, Sister Mary Joseph noticed that whenever there was a firm mass near the umbilicus, the patient turned out to have cancer. Will Mayo published an article in 1928 @MayoProceedings about this – he called it “pants button umbilicus.” /3

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