Louis K. Diamond ^People

Dr. Diamond was a longtime professor at Harvard Medical School and associate chief of staff at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. In the late 1940's, he also directed the American Red Cross National Blood Program and established theBlood Grouping Laboratory in Boston.H i s pioneering work in the field has led his colleagues and many students to call him the father of pediatric hematology, thebranch dealing with blood and blood diseases. Dr. Diamond is known worldwide for his work in the 1930's and 1940'swith Rh disease and the treatment called exchange transfusion. In 1932, he and Dr. Kenneth Blackfan discovered that four diseases of infants were manifestations of a solesyndrome, erythroblastosis fetalis, also called Rh disease, a condition that at that time affected about 1in 200 babies, killing orirreversibly harming half of them.Later, in the early 1940's, other researchers discovered that Rh disease occurred when a pregnant mother with Rh-negative blood carryied an Rh-positive fetus, the result of having an Rh-positive father.The mother, exposed to the Rh-positive blood during delivery or during preg- nancy, produces antibodies against her infant's blood. Then, in later pregnancies, the mother's antibodies, traveling through the placenta, damage the red blood cells of Rh-positive fetuses, causing severe anemia, heart failure and brain damage.