History of Blood Transfusion

Blood in our hearts or blood on our hands? The viscosity, vitality and validity of Aboriginal ‘blood talk’.

“…Blood talk has a particularly powerful social meaning because it is regularly associated with an essential vitality of life (Maluf 1954). Thus, to talk of this vitality is to frame both the meaning of the individual body and also the broader social, spiritual and political body.…”

Direct blood transfusions

“…Nobel Suydam Rustum Maluf’s 3 History of Blood Transfusion, written in 1954, as a J. Bently Squire urology resident in New York, portrays the muddling allusions and uncertainties that preceded 50-year-old William Harvey’s 1628 publication of “Exercito Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus.” These ranged from Ovid (43 bc -18 ce ) relating a story of exsanguination and repletion with a “rich elixir,” to Saxon, physician-chemist Andreas Libavius’s vivid 1615 description of an artery-to-artery transfusion from a healthy person into a cachectic old man through connecting silver cannulae that imparted the “fountain of life” and drove away “all faintness.” Libavius had not actually performed the procedure, but his artery-to-artery connection reflected the prevailing belief that blood sloshed back and forth in arteries fortified by pulses of air, accounting both for their emptiness after death and a more temperate to-and-fro movement in veins.…”

Heart transplantation: Research that led to the first human transplant in 1967

“…The overall experience was reviewed by Guthrie in 1912, who summed up the situation as follows: 'No one, though many experiments have been reported, has yet succeeded in keeping an animal alive for any great length of time which carried the kidney or kidneys of another animal, after its own kidneys were removed … the outlook is by no means hopeless and the principle of immunity which yields such brilliant results in many other fields would be worthy of being tested in this case' . 3,4 Blood grouping and blood transfusions are an integral part of transplantation. Ancient Greek and Egyptian writings show that, even in those early times, blood transfusions were held to be both advisable and indeed possible.…”