Blood Transfusion goes back to 1667

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18311, 12 November 1927, Page 19 (Supplement)

Blood Transfusion goes back to 1667

A LTHOUGH only a few years ago a case of blood transfusion was rare enough to create a mild sensation, with the surgery of to-day patients by the hundred pass under the treatment, and hardly a week goes by without some reference being made to it. In 1667 (writes J. Gibbons in “Chambers’s Journal ”), the operation was performed for the benefit of the Royal Society, the enterprising impressario actually hiring a patient for the occasion at the general fee of a whole pound. The subject was, we are told, a little mad, and though he claimed to have been benefited by the operation, his contem-

poraries held him still “ cracked a little in the head.” After that transfusions gradually became more common, but though from time to time a startling success was recorded, it was, as it were, a purely accidental bullseye, vastly outnumbered by the total failures and even fatalities. For the doctor was shooting in the dark, and while A’s blood might benefit B, it might, oh the other hand, kill him. It was only fairly recently that science discovered the principle of the four different “groups ” of blood, and how it was that, while a patient’s gift might only kill his own child, another patient might be saved by a total stranger with the very minimum of trouble. And with the discovery there came into being the modern system of “ giving.” An offer by a volunteer donor to one of several societies in England will be followed by a request to report at leisure to the nearest hospital, where in the course of a minute or so a speck of blood is taken with the scratch of a needle. A post-card tells the volunteer the number of his group, and henceforward he may expect a call some time to an unknown patient in need of that particular blood. In London there is a special transfusion service, whose volunteers range fro ma peeress to the sweeper-out of a Salvation Army refuge, and day and night an office awaits the calls from hospitals in need. A man, it is said, ought to be able to give a quart of blood and go to work without trouble. All that the writer can depose is that, though he has most certainly never wanted to go straight (or otherwise) to work, he has managed in the mid-forties to do it twice in four days without notable inconvenience. At five guineas a time, by the way, the maximum fee for a professional, this would work out at nearly £IOOO a year, and though, of course, nobody could “ give ” enough to make such a living, there are plenty of paid donors. The professional one, I am glad to say, is generally being ousted by the volunteer, as the man in the street more and more realises how easy the business is. Both in England and the United States the blood-group idea has been quoted in the courts as evidence of family, and at least to the outsider there seems nothing to prevent its use in the pedigree cases of the future. A Tichborne blood-test would have provided a good sensation for the Press of the day.