He is credited with the description of sickle-cell disease and was one of the first physicians to describe the symptoms of myocardial infarction.

He received a BA degree from the University of Michigan in 1882, after which he taught school in Peoria, Illinois and Oak Park.

Herrick's second major contribution was a landmark article on myocardial infarction ("heart attack") in JAMA in 1912.

[5][6] He proposed that thrombosis in the coronary artery leads to the symptoms and abnormalities of heart attacks and that this was not inevitably fatal.

Herrick is not closely associated with genetics, but his discoveries turned out to be inherited traits, so his contributions pointed other researchers toward genetically-based conditions.