William Bosworth Castle: pioneer of haematological clinical investigation.

Abstract

William Bosworth Castle (1897-1990) spent his entire haematological career at the Harvard Medical Unit and Thorndike Memorial Laboratory at Boston City Hospital during the golden age of haematology. Castle's experiments in solving the puzzle of pernicious anaemia by identifying the intrinsic factor are models of clinical investigation and marked a new era in haematology. Castle's insatiable curiosity about the mechanisms of disease, his ability to design and conduct simple experiments to test hypotheses, and his ability to attract clinical investigators to the Thorndike Laboratory, and inspire them and make them feel like intellectual equals, fuelled the dramatic output of seminal work on nutritional anaemias, haemolysis, splenic function, haemoglobin physiology and coagulation. Indeed it was Castle's breadth of scientific achievements in haematology and his leadership of the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory that contributed to the notion that modern haematology was born in Boston but nurtured at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory.