Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Coulter Principle: For The Good Of Humankind, Marshall Graham

Theses and Dissertations--History

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 made Wallace H. Coulter abruptly comprehend the critical need for rapid and accurate blood-cell counts in providing care for victims of radiation exposure. This thesis documents the unwritten story of his journey from that comprehension through his invention and implementation of the Coulter Principle, its commercialization in the first widely available automated blood-cell counter, and elaboration of that ground-breaking counter into increasingly sophisticated instrumentation for analysis not only of blood cells, but of particles involved in many other scientific disciplines. International cold-war politics and the burgeoning of increasingly powerful nuclear …