Old names for Sickle Cell Disease?

Question

I was looking at another case of sickle cell today, and found my thoughts wandering:

Sickle Cell trait originated in Africa as a defense against malaria.  Carrying one gene for the trait is not harmful, but carrying two genes is usually fatal, even with treatment.  But surely, people were dying of Sickle Cell disease before we even knew what it was - even before the Europeans began serious colonization of Africa.  So I wonder, when some kid belonging to some primitive African tribe drops dead of Sickle Cell, did they have a name for the illness?  Did they even recognize it at all, or was it simply buried in the usual infant mortality?

I wonder if they thought it was contagious?  Did they have some sort of treatment or "cure"?

The Robster · Accepted Answer

This collection of clinical findings was unknown until the explanation of the sickle cells in 1904 by the Chicago cardiologist and professor of medicine James B. Herrick (1861-1954) whose intern Ernest Edward Irons (1877-1959) found "peculiar elongated and sickle shaped" cells in the blood of Walter Clement Noel, a 20 year old first year dental student from Grenada after Noel was admitted to the Chicago Presbyterian Hospital in December 1904 suffering from anaemia. Noel was readmitted several times over the next three years for "muscular rheumatism" and "bilious attacks". Noel completed his studies and returned to the capital of Grenada (St. George's) to practice dentistry. He died of pneumonia in 1916 and is buried in the Catholic cemetery at Sauteurs in the north of Grenada.[13]

The disease was named "sickle-cell anaemia" by Vernon Mason in 1922. In retrospect 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. The African medical literature reported this condition in the 1870s where it was known locally as ogbanjes ("children who come and go") because of the very high infant mortality rate caused by this condition. A history of the condition tracked reports back to 1670 in one Ghanaian family.

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Old names for Sickle Cell Disease?

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