By Kenneth Kaushansky, MD, FACP

2008-01-01

Dr. Kaushansky is Helen M. Ranney Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Kaushansky is President of ASH.

It is my great pleasure and honor as President to welcome you to the 50th year of the American Society of Hematology, a year that promises to be our best in terms of promoting translational and clinical hematology, teaching its art and science, and advancing our understanding of normal and pathological blood formation and function. As you will see from perusing the cover and content of this issue of The Hematologist and the January 1 issue of Blood, we are celebrating this milestone through images, historical narratives, and timely review articles. Throughout the year, our members will be treated to historical reviews in every issue of Blood, and historical biographies in the pages of The Hematologist. The education sessions at the annual meeting and the meeting book, Hematology 2008, will be splashed with historical introductions and images of the topics that practicing hematologists find most interesting. The meeting rooms and common areas of our 2008 annual meeting site, Moscone Center in San Francisco, will be filled with banners featuring photographs of pioneers in hematology and information about the first annual meeting and milestones in both hematology and ASH. Video vignettes of past presidents and pioneers in hematology will be featured throughout the meeting and will bring our attendees a sense of the excitement that is hematology. A special brochure, titled Conquering Blood Diseases – From Research to Patient Care, will be available and will make the progress of hematology more accessible to our patients, friends, and family. You will even notice our special 50th anniversary meeting bags will be worthy of collection! And please don’t miss the ASH Bash on Monday evening of the annual meeting, "A Taste of San Francisco." So enjoy 2008, the year of the Hematologist!

April 7, 1957: 1st Organizational Meeting of the American Society of Hematology

Geraldine P. Schechter, MD, Chief of the Hematology Section at Washington VA Medical Center and Professor of Medicine at George Washington University, kindly sent ASH a copy of the Program of the First Organizational Meeting of the American Society of Hematology held on April 7, 1957, at the Harvard Club in Boston, MA.

She writes: "It was given to me by my mentor Dr. William McFarland a couple of years ago, framed with the note on the back in which he explains that he had it copied in color because the bracket drawn around the first group of papers had been done by Bill Dameshek [pictured above] with his ‘futuristic’ pen, which I took to be a ball point pen."

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