Sickle cell first reported by James B Herrick, (Herrick 1910) a Chicago cardiologist and professor of medicine United States, in red blood cells. The disease was named "sickle-cell anaemia" by Verne Mason in 1922, then a medical resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital.(Konotey-Ahulu 2004) However, some elements of the disease had been recognized earlier: A paper in the Southern Journal of Medical Pharmacology in 1846 described the absence of a spleen in the autopsy of a runaway slave.