The history of serological investigations of the blood of the insane is traced
from the initial such study in 1854 by a solitary Scottish asylum physician, who
counted the blood cells of his lunatic patients under a weak microscope, to the
January 2005 announcement by an international team of geneticists of the
development of a genomic blood test that can differentially diagnose
schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The story of the first claim of the
development of a blood test for madness in 1912 -the Abderhalden defensive
ferments reaction test -is related in detail. Studies of the blood of the insane
have followed four general methodological paradigms: the corpuscular richness
paradigm (1854); the metabolic paradigm (c. 1895); the
immunoserodiagnostic paradigm (1906); and the medical genomics paradigm (2005).
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