BLOOD OF DEAD MAN

Taranaki Daily News, 25 November 1935, Page 11

BLOOD OF DEAD MAN

EMERGENCY TRANSFUSION. RUSSIAN ADVANCE IN SURGERY. There can be no doubt that the foreign physiologists attending the International Congress of Physiology at Leningrad and Moscow would be taken to the Sklifasovsky Institute and various public hospitals, there to behold the work that Soviet physicians and surgeons are doing in collecting and preserving dead men’s blood to be used in emergency transfusions, writes Waldemar Kaempffert in the New York Times. In this field the Russians are pioneers.

A few years ago Professor Chaumov showed that the blood of a dog not too long dead might be successfully trans-

ferreid to.a.live one.. Driven by the sudden necessity of. finding a human donor of blood for a patient who was dying trom a self-inflicted .razor gash, Dr. Judine, head of a Moscow hospital, decided in a flash to extend the principle. ( In the hospital morgue lay the cadaver of a man of 60 who had died six hours before from a fractured skull. Judine drew off 450 cubic centimetres of the dead man's blood and injected it into the vein's of the would-be suicide. Four days later the recipient walked out of the hospital with a dead man’s blood in his veins. Ever since Soviet emergency hospitals keep on hand bottles of blood prevented from clumping by sodium citrate and other standard stabilisers.

A SUMMARY OF RESULTS.

The .more recent aspects of this development are given by Professor' A. Eagdasaraov in Front Nauki I Tekhniki (the Scientific and Technical Front)

and by Dr. B. N. Gusyev in Clinichesakaya Meditzina (Clinical Medicine) tn articles which are sketchy but still informative enough.

A summary of the results in some 300 transfusions carried out according to the new method indicates that six hours after blood has been collected it still possesses its more important properties. In the case of instant death blood will keep as a liquid without any stabiliser for three or four weeks but whether this is true in a bottle is not clear from the Russian journals. When the wound that caused death is so large that bacteria can enter, the blood is useless for transfusion because of the possibility of infection. Wasserman tests for syphilis are always essential. Because the lives of man. wounded soldiers could be saved by emergency transfusions in base hospitals Dr. S. S. Bryukhonenko—the mar. who cut off a dog’s head and kept it alive for .two hours with the aid of an artificial heart

and circulatory system—has invented a special receptacle for transporting blood. Already the principal railway stations in Soviet Russia have quarters to which blood is carried by this means. .Dr. Gustayev mentions 131 transfusions which he has carried out in a railroad hospital since 1932—a1l with preserved blood and all without a fatality. Bryukhonenko claims that malaria germs die in preserved blood after about five days. His preservative is synanthrine, a Bayer preparation, American physicians ■ will demand details. They will argue that more synanthrine would have to be mixed with the blood than is called for to act as a preservative and that this additional amount may be toxic. At any rate Bryukhonenko says that his preserved blood will kill malaria germs in the body. Dr. Guyasev even goes so far as to say that the transfusion of fresh healthy or. of well-pre-served blood ...will cure some infectious diseases,, such' 'as* typhus’ and dysentery.

Again American physicians will ask for clinical proof. CLASSIFICATION OF BLOOD. ' It is elementary knowledge that the blood of a donor must match that of a recipient. If it does not, agglutination (clumping) and death follow. Hence the care taken to identify blood, classify it into one of the four main groups discovered by Dr. Landsteiner of' the Rockefeller Institute, and to select for transfusion only the one that will mix well with that of the recipient. One of these four groups is designated by the letter “O.” It is found in the blood of all races and may well have been' the primeval type. Because it is the “universal donor” a very little of it can be used in all transfusions. But the Soviet scientists would limit the practice to wartime emergencies. They claim that the other .three types may also be thus* sparingly transfused

with beneficial effects in. stimulating the recipient’s own blood. In .fact the Russians have ventured to transfuse a little cow’s, dog’s, and goat’s blood and claim some success in the treatment of chronic stomach, ulcers and of blood poisoning caused by infection. Why this should be so Professor V. A. Bogolomets, president of the AllUkrainian Academy of Sciences, attempt to explain in a theory of his own. To him the blood preserved in a bottle is more than a substitute for that of the patient who is to receive. it. It is a powerful stimulant. It has regenerative powers created by the. interaction of its own proteins with those of the recipient’s blood., Cytolisines (products of cellular decomposition of transfused blood) also have a stimulating effect.