Pernicious anemia

“A key development during this era was the way the patient’s response to Eli Lilly’s liver extract was interpreted as a kind of bioassay, a diagnostic technology in its own right retrospectively constituting ‘the disease.’ Rather than curing all of the patient ordinarily diagnosed with pernicious anemia, this disease became, by definition, that entity which was cured by a new consumable and de facto diagnostic technology – liver extract. . . . [In his 1956 autobiography, Boston hematologist Roger Lee] “reflected on how academic medicine’s commercial ties had transformed medical writers into spokesmen for the drug industry” (Wailoo I, 141).