Several decades after William
Harvey demonstrated how blood circulated, attempts were made to transfuse
blood. In 1665, Richard Lower successfully kept dogs alive by transfusing blood
from other dogs, and two years later, Jean-Baptiste Denys performed the first
documented blood transfusion into a human subject. Whereas single transfusions
were sometimes successful, the recipients often succumbed after receiving their
second or third transfusion. By the end of the seventeenth century, blood
transfusions were banned and fell into obscurity until 1818, when James
Blundell, an English obstetrician, performed the first successful transfusion
of human blood for the treatment of postpartum bleeding. Between 1825 and 1830,
he performed ten transfusions—five of which were beneficial. Not only was
Blundell medically successful but also financially, earning the present-day
equivalent of $50 million from his invention of blood transfusion instruments.
The discovery of blood types
by Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian-born American immunologist, transformed
transfusions into a routine medical procedure. In 1901, at Vienna’s Institute
of Pathology, he reported that when the blood of some individuals was brought
into contact with some other’s, it could cause agglutination (clumping) of the
red blood cells with fatal consequences, and this resulted from an
immunological (antigen-antibody) reaction. He identified three human blood
groups, A, B, and C (later renamed O), and subsequently a fourth group, AB.
Landsteiner’s blood typing served
as the basis for the first successful transfusions of compatible blood into
recipients in 1907 at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York and on a large-scale basis
on the World War I battlefields. In 1927, ABO blood types were introduced for
use in paternity suits to establish the biological parents of a child.
Landsteiner was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize for his discovery of human blood
groups and the ABO system of blood typing. In 1940, while working at the
Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University), he discovered another blood
factor in Rhesus monkeys. This Rh factor was responsible for the potentially
life-threatening hemolytic disease of the newborn, which occurs when a mother
and her fetus have incompatible blood types.
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