ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the history of Sickle cell disease (SCD) in twentieth-century United States of America, with occasional reference to other Anglophone contexts. It does so in order to de-centre those understandings of SCD derived from the US experience in the twentieth century. The chapter looks at some of the social and political features of the way in which sickle cell has become visible. The historiography of sickle cell suggests that histories have tended to be reduced to accounts of early biomedical papers from the “discovery” of “peculiar elongated cells” under the microscope to subsequent case studies, who first named sickle cell anaemia as such. In a miscegenation world-view, the racist conclusion was that mixed relationships between black and white partners made SCD worse because such admixture was not natural in admixed African-Americans, whereas it purportedly sat “naturally” within the bodies of pure Africans.
