The diamond anniversary of the Journal of Clinical Pathology (JCP) provides the opportunity to reflect of the past 60 years of haematology. It offers the chance to look back as well as forwards. This has been a time of unforeseeable advances, of which I remember only those of the past 40 years. Review of the articles published by the journal in its first decade immediately makes evident the changes that have occurred in haematology as a science and as a clinical discipline. In the late 1940s haematology was still largely a laboratory discipline. The first editor of JCP was, in fact, a haematologist, Dr Gordon Signy. In 1943, the Association of Clinical Pathologists invited him to produce a bi-annual bulletin but he soon transformed this into JCP, which he then edited with great distinction for more than 25 years.

A third of the articles published in the journal in the first decade dealt with haematology. Blood cell counting, coagulation, and blood transfusion were all well represented. In the first decade, no less than five articles were published on Rhesus (now Rh) blood grouping, one of which dealt with Chown’s capillary tube method, still remembered by older haematologists forced to do out of hours laboratory work in their younger days. These were also the days of …