Rarely has it been our good fortune to have a disease recognized, its cause clearly determined, its treatment successfully developed to a great extent, and then its prevention found, all in one generation. It is gratifying to be able to review such a sequence of events, especially the latest advance. In 1932, we1 drew together and defined as a single entity, generally called erythroblastosis fetalis, four conditions previously described separately, namely late fetal death with erythroblastosis in the tissues, fetal hydrops, congenital anemia of the newborn, and icterus gravis neonatorum.In 1941, Philip Levine and coworkers2 astutely surmised that the disease resulted from immunization of the mother against a blood group factor of her infant and the development of hemolytic anemia in the baby from the transplacental passage of maternal antibodies.
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