1628: English physician William Harvey discovers the circulation of blood and attempts the first blood transfusion.
1667: Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Denis and Englishman Richard Lower successfully transfuse blood from animals to humans. Lower discovers that arteries carry blood away from the heart to the tissues in the body, while veins carry blood from the tissues back to the heart. He learns that a donor could donate blood through an artery while a recipient could receive blood through a vein.
1818: James Blundell, an English physician from London, discovers two important principles in blood transfusion: only human blood can be used in humans and transfusions must only be performed in cases of accidental blood loss. Dr. Blundell experiments with human transfusions and half of his patients die. This labels blood transfusion as “radical and experimental procedure[s].”
1875: Only about 347 transfusions had been carried out worldwide.
1900: Karl Landsteiner discovers three basic blood types: A, B and C. However, C blood type was changed to O and AB blood type was added. Blood transfusions improved significantly after these discoveries, but continued to be risky, difficult and often fatal.
1925: Blood transfusion begins in the US when a group of New York doctors create the Blood Betterment Association.
1926: Doctor Alexander Bogdanov opens the Central Institute of Hematology, the first center for blood transfusion research. He dies of a blood infection when he conducts experiments on himself. His sacrifice passed on his findings to other researchers so they could avoid his mistakes.
History of the Storage of Blood
1937: American doctor Bernard Fantas opens the first location where people can donate blood in Chicago. He refrigerates blood for later use and coins the term “blood bank.”
1936: American doctor John Eliot makes his research about using plasma versus whole blood public.