Treating thrombosis in the 21st century.

The seemingly magical transmutation of shed blood into a solid has fascinated inquisitive observers for millennia. Hippocrates, in De Carnibus, and Aristotle, in Meteorology, postulated that the phenomenon was due to cooling, and as late as the 1790s John Hunter suggested that exposure to air was the cause. In 1832, Johannes Muller identified the insoluble clot substance “fibrin,” and Rudolf Virchow named its hypothetical soluble plasma precursor “fibrinogen.” Fibrinogen was isolated by Prosper Sylvain Denis in 1856. Alexander Schmidt demonstrated that the transformation of fibrinogen into fibrin was a “fermentative” (enzymatic) process and named the fibrin ferment “thrombin”; he called . . .