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Heart's Blood: A Biography Of Lemuel Whitley Diggs, Richard Harold Nollan
Heart's Blood: A Biography Of Lemuel Whitley Diggs, Richard Harold Nollan
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This dissertation examines the career of Lemuel Whitley Diggs, who joined the faculty in 1929 at the University of Tennessee Medical Units in Memphis. As a white doctor, he spent his career seeking more effective therapies for patients afflicted with sickle cell anemia, which was considered a black disease, a racial marker, and a sign of black inferiority. His most insightful contributions to understanding sickle cell occurred in the 1930s and 1940s while he was relatively unknown except to a handful of sickle cell researchers nationwide. By the late 1940s, storing blood for later transfusion became a practical reality, enabling …