THE HISTORY OF BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS

1818: The first successful human blood transfusion is performed by British obstetrician James Blundell. With no understanding of blood types, “successes were frequent enough to encourage the operation’s continued use; failures were attributed to clotted blood, or to the hopeless state of the patient,” Kim Pelis writes. 1880: Blood transfusion, with its many risks, falls from favour among British physiologists, who prefer saline infusions. Most of the patients experiencing with blood loss in this era are postpartum women. 1898: U.S. surgeon George Washington Crile studies physiology in Europe. He was concerned with shock, a mysterious condition that came after surgery or injury, and resulted in “thready pulse” and often death. Crile believed blood would be better than saline, but he didn’t have a good technique for transferring blood between bodies. 1901: Three different blood types are discovered —A, B and O — and the following year, a fourth: AB. 1906: Crile connects a donor’s artery to a patient’s vein to perform a direct human-to-human blood transfusion. “The result was so successful he dubbed it a ‘midnight resurrection,’ ” Pelis writes. His success heralds a conversion to blood transfusion in the U.S. 1907: The British Medical Journal does not support blood transfusion as a method: “. . . surgeons, we imagine, will find no good reasons given here for abandoning the safe and simple method of saline injection.” 1910s: A growing number of American doctors experiment with ways to making transfusion simpler. Law- rence Bruce Robertson from Toronto learns the syringe method at Bellevue Hospital in New York. 1913: Robertson returns to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and conducts what could be the hospital’s first blood transfusion. 1914: Robertson enlists for war. 1916: After performing blood transfusions on the Western Front, and demonstrating his methods for British and Canadian medical units, Robertson publishes an influential article in the British Medical Journal. 1917: The U.S. enters the war, and American Dr. Oswald Hope Robertson later stores blood mixed with a “citrate and dextrose solution” in glass bottles, on ice, creating the world’s first blood bank. Sources: “Taking Credit: The Canadian Army Medical Corps and the British Conversion to Blood Transfusion in WWI,” by Kim Pelis; AABB Foundation