With a crowd of more than 80 people in attendance, Todd Savitt described sickle cell anemia and the first two patients who were discovered to have the disease, Monday.

The first diagnosed patient of sickle cell anemia was Walter Clement Noel, who was born to an upper class planter family in Grenada in 1884. He showed signs of the disease before he moved to Chicago to enter dentistry school and headed back to Grenada in 1907 to open a dentistry business, Savitt said.

The name and history of the second diagnosed patient had not been released at the lecture by press time.

Savitt wanted to explain “the story behind the story.” Sickle cell anemia has been around for a long time but was discovered in Western medicine as recently as 1910, he said.

Tiffanie Kinney, senior in anthropology, attended the 8 p.m. lecture Monday in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union to get credit for her History 352, Social and Cultural History of American People, class.

“I’m interested in this lecture because we study this in anthropology,” she said. “It’s interesting how genetics works. It can be bad, but good at the same time.”

At the beginning of the lecture, Savitt said, “I hope to give you new information about a disease you don’t know much about.”

Sickle cell anemia originated in Africa and the Mediterranean area and was then brought to other countries through “intermarriage, movement of people and slavery.”

“Sickle cells get caught in blood vessels and cause blockages,” Savitt said. “This results in anemia.”

Savitt, who went to medical school for several years before leaving to get his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, presented a slide show of documents and pictures relating to the first patients of sickle cell anemia.

After this disease was first diagnosed in Chicago, people began to think, “Anybody who has sickle cell must be black,” he said.

“African-Americans feared genocide in the ’70s,” Savitt said.

Hamilton Cravens, professor of history, invited students from his History 352 class to attend the lecture if they were interested and then write a two-page paper for extra credit. Cravens, who has known Savitt for more than 10 years said the lecture related to material from his class.