The history of blood transfusions is a long and intriguing one that stretches back thousands of years in surprising and fascinating ways. Let’s learn more about the history of blood donations.
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Humans have been connecting the relationship between blood and overall health for millennia, but not in the way we now do. A tomb in Memphis, Egypt dating from 2500 BCE, included an illustration depicting a patient being bled from the foot and neck in a process known as bloodletting. Essentially, ancient doctors believed that when a patient was ill, the illness was essentially caused by bad blood, and the only way to cure the patient was to purge the bad blood from the body.
To say the practice of bloodletting was limited to ancient medicine, though, doesn’t give enough credit to just how long the procedure was a go-to “cure” for diseases. In fact, there are artifacts of it still existing in our everyday lives. See, even though a doctor gave the prescription for bloodletting, a barber fulfilled it since, in addition to cutting hair, they were also tasked with performing surgery. To advertise this service, barbers in the Middle Ages started painting poles outside their shops with white and red stripes to represent bones (specifically teeth since they often performed tooth extraction) and blood. This advertising device became so common that we still associate these poles with barbershops today.
Even though most bloodletting led to more harm to patients, bloodletting was widely used until the end of the 18th century. So much so that one of the highest-profile cases of bloodletting occurred in 1799 in Mount Vernon, Virginia, where George Washington had over three liters of blood drained from his body in about 10 hours, leading to his death. The irony is that in 1795, a Philadelphia doctor named Philip Syng Physick had performed the first human blood transfusion, though he did not publish this information.
Thankfully, as time went by, doctors and medical professionals recognized that when patients were sick and injured, these patients required more blood, not less. And in 1900, an Austrian doctor named Karl Landsteiner discovered three categories of human blood, which he called A, B, and C (which was later changed to O); Landsteiner would win a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1930 for this discovery. Two of his students, Adriano Sturli and Alfred von Decastello, subsequently discovered the AB blood type. And in 1907, a doctor in New York named Reuben Ottenberg started transfusing blood using the Landsteiner method—leading him to find out that O-type blood is a universal donor that anyone of any blood type can receive.
The iconic barber’s pole has an unexpected relationship with blood.
Skipping forward again to 1940, the United States government establishes a nationwide blood collection program, and in 1941, albumin is used to treat injured soldiers during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Donated blood would prove critical to the war effort as dried plasma was vital for the treatment of wounded soldiers during the Second World War. When the Red Cross ended its World War II blood donation program in 1945, the organization had collected more than 13 million pints of blood. Next, in 1947, the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB) was founded to promote common goals among blood banks and the general public.
Today, there are over 1,000 AABB-accredited organizations located all over the world. One such organization is the South Bend Medical Foundation, founded in 1912 to provide blood banking and pathology services to the northern Indiana region. We’re proud to have served this region for over 100 years. So, what’s the next innovation in blood banking? While we don’t know yet, we know the South Bend Medical Foundation will be in step with these innovations every step of the way.
