The first blood transfusion was in 1667, then it was banned for 150 years. Now there is one every 3 seconds. These two breakthroughs help make it happen
Blood transfusions were extremely risky. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they went horribly wrong. The work of Karl Landsteiner and Albert Hustin helped make them much safer.
On June 15 1667 a boy, somewhere between 12 and 15 years old, had been laying in bed sick for 2 months with a fever.
A doctor, Jean-Baptiste Denis, decided to try giving him the blood of a lamb.
In those days blood was believed to contain character. Give a boy the blood of a lamb Denis believed and you’d pass alone some of the lambs “mild and laudable" nature.
This became the first time a person received a blood transfusion.
When I heard this story, I thought the poor boy was in for a horrific and grizzly death. A doctor in the 1600’s injecting a boy with the blood of a lamb? Must be one of those cautionary tales about the dark ages of medicine. The type that makes you grateful for modern hospitals.
But amazingly. Strangely. The boy survived.
As did the second person Jean-Baptiste performed his blood transfer on. An otherwise healthy man who for the sake of experimentation was also given the blood of a lamb.
But Patients 3 an 4 were not as lucky.
This is where the grizzly part starts. Jean-Baptiste describe what happened to patient 3:
“As soon as the blood began to enter into his veins, he felt the like heat along his Arm … his pulse rose presently, and soon after we observed a plentiful sweat all over his face.”
He died a few days later. Patient 4 died during the blood transfer.
In the 17th century blood transfusions were a lottery. Why did the 15 year old boy survive but not some of the other patients? Same doctor, same techniques yet the results were frustratingly unpredictable.
It’s likely the first two patients survived because they were given so little blood (human and animal blood do not mix well together).
But we didn’t know that at the time, and blood transfusions were still extremely dangerous, so they were banned. And they remained banned for around 150 years.
Then Karl Landsteiner came along.
In 1900, Karl stumbled onto something that would save millions of lives. When he mixed blood from different people together, sometimes the blood clumped and sometimes it didn’t. He paid attention to which blood samples clumped and which did not, and divided them into three groups: A, B and 0 (we all read the last group as the letter O, but Karl meant it to be a zero because it didn’t clump.)
Karl had discovered blood groups.
Not all blood, it turns out, was the same.
It explained why some blood transfusions worked and why some failed. Blood transfusions were a lottery. When they worked it just so happened the donor and the receiver had compatible blood types.
This was a humongous discovery. A wholy shit moment. Blood transfusions went from a lottery to more of a science. And it became safer than ever to receive blood from a stranger.
Then a second discovery made blood transfusions even safer.
To perform a blood transfer the donor and receiver had to be in the same room because we couldn’t store blood. Today, you could pop down to your local blood banks, they would draw your blood, store it, and move it to a hospital where it could save a life. This was not possible in 1900’s.
That changed thanks to the work of Belgian physician Albert Hustin.
In 1915, Albert learned (after a shit ton of experiments), that when he added a precise amount of sodium citrate to blood, it could be safely stored for 2 days. A year later, others scientists helped to bump this number up to 14 days. This was an enormous improvement. Now we didn’t have to rely on the donor and recipient being in the same place. Blood could be moved to where it is needed.
Those two breakthroughs: The discovery of blood groups and learning how to store blood has saved an estimated 1 billion lives. And counting.
In
’s fantastic book Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood, she writes:“Every three seconds, somewhere in the world, a person receives a stranger’s blood. Globally, 13,282 centers in 176 countries collect 110 million donations. The United States transfuses 16 million units of blood annually; the UK, 2.5 million. All of this blood is given to people when they have cancer or anemia or when they give birth; it can assist equally in trauma or chronic disease. Some accident victims can receive 60 units of blood; a liver transplant patient can use 100, or several bodies-full. A newborn can be saved with a teaspoonful.”
I never thought I’d read a whole book about blood, but darn me, it’s excellent.
A lot of people are to thank for how safe blood transfusions are. But we can start with the wonderful work of Karl Landsteiner and Albert Hustin.
Definitely some problem solvers right there.