1928

Following JAMA publication of George Minot and William Murphy of 1926 and ensuing collaboration of the Harvard Pernicious Anemia Commission with Eli Lilly, Lilly releases Liver Extract No. 343, the production and availability of which “helped ensure that Minot’s [hematologic] definition of pernicious anemia would become, for this crucial period, the definition of penicillin anemia. ” In fact, by 1928, liver treatment was being used as a “de facto diagnostic technique for pernicious anemia.” (Wailoo I, 168-170). By 1934, when Minot, Murphy, and Whipple won the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for path-breaking work on pernicious anemia, “the disease had been reconstructed around the antidote. Pernicious anemia was a disease curable by liver therapy” (175, emp. In original).