Who conducted the first blood transfusion to a human being?
The first BLOOD TRANSFUSION to a human being was carried out on 12 June 1667 by Jean-Baptiste Denys, Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at Montpellier University and personal physician to Louis XIV. The patient was a boy of 15 suffering from a severe fever who had already been bled 20 times `to assuage the excessive heat’. In order to compensate for this loss of blood, Denys gave him a transfusion of 9 oz of blood from the carotid artery of a lamb. According to the Professor his patient responded to this extremely dangerous experiment by displaying ‘a clear and smiling countenance’ and eventually recovered. Others were riot so fortunate, and after one of Denys’s victims had died as a result of receiving animal’s blood, the practice was prohibited in France and fell into disrepute elsewhere
The first transfusion of human blood was performed in September 1818 by the brilliant 28-year-old Dr Thomas Blundell, of Guy’s Hospital, London. Blundell used a syringe of his own invention to inject some 12-14 oz of fresh blood from several different donors, but his patient was in a moribund state and already beyond hope of recovery. Another 10 years were to pass before he succeeded in saving the life of a patient by this means and by that time others had preceded him,
The first recorded instance of a patient’s life being saved by a blood transfusion occurred in London in 1825, when a Dr Doubleday gave 14 oz of blood to a woman suffering from a severe internal hemorrhage. After receiving only 6 oz she sat up in bed and announced ‘I feel as strong as a bull’. Her pulse rate subsequently fell from 140 to 104.
Although this case demonstrated that blood transfusion could be effective if carefully regulated, there were still two major obstacles to be overcome before it has any chance of general acceptance. Foremost was ignorance of incompatibility, and not until Karl Landsteiner of Vienna discovered blood groups in 1900 was it possible for doctors to match the donor to the patient. Several years were to pass before this knowledge was applied in a practical manner, but in 1907 the Norwegian scientist Jansky made the first reliable classification of blood groups, and the following year Dr Reuben Ottenberg of New York instituted the practice of making blood tests before a transfusion.
The other major difficulty was blood clotting, a factor which had probably helped to save some of the unfortunate subjects of those gruesome experiments with animal blood, since it prevented more than a few ounces from entering the blood-stream. The answer to this lay with the chemical sodium citrate, which acts an anti-coagulant and enables blood to be decanted into bottles ready for use, so that a transfusion can be given without the presence of the donor. The citrate method was discovered by the Belgian surgeon. A. Hustin, who performed the first indirect transfusion with blood stored in this way at the Hopital Sant-Jean in Brussels on 27 March 1914.
Although citrate would prevent clotting, the problem of preserving blood-supplies for more than a few hours remained. This was overcome in 1917 by Dr Oswald Robertson, an American physician serving with the Canadian forces on the Western Front, who conceived the idea of storing blood corpuscles in jars of glucose, in much the same way as jam in preserved. The blood was collected behind the lines from Group 0 donors and then brought under refrigeration to the RAMC Casualty Clearing Station near Doullens by ambulance. There, under Dr Robertson’s supervision, it was stored in a cool dug-out until required, the blood corpuscles needing only the addition of a saline solution to be ready for use.
