Blood transfusions were successfully performed 200 years ago.
200 years ago, British obstetrician James Blundell performed the world's first successful human-to-human blood transfusion operation - blood transfusion. However, it was only a hundred years later that the mastered method became ubiquitous and generally available. The impetus for the massive use of blood transfusion was given by the First World War. The discovery helps to save thousands of people who have suffered both in military conflicts and in civilian life.
Although Blundell's developments are used today and for not entirely legal purposes. In professional sports, autohemotransfusion is quite common - the transfusion of an athlete's own blood, which accelerates the delivery of oxygen to the muscles.
For his era, Blundell certainly made a real breakthrough. Scientific knowledge about blood was still at a very low level. However, Blundell devoted his entire life to studying the subject. By the age of 28, at which he performed the historical operation, the Londoner could already be called a highly qualified specialist - by the standards of the early 19th century, of course.
Using as a donor the spouse of his patient, who had postpartum hemorrhage, the obstetrician took a little more than 100 milliliters of blood from the man's hand and poured it to the woman in labor with a syringe. History has not preserved the woman's name. But it is known that Blundell came to the conclusion that it was necessary to master the method of blood transfusion under the impression of personally seeing deaths due to blood loss. He considered the main indication for blood transfusion to be blood loss during childbirth.
By 1818, a young obstetrician, whose qualifications went far beyond the profession, conducted a series of experiments on dogs. Blundell was able to notice that blood transfusions from animals to humans fail each time. Through trial and error, he understood the differing properties and, as a consequence, the incompatibility of blood in different mammals.
Drawing in an article by James Blundell, Observations of Blood Transfusion, 1829.
And even though the very first experience of transfusion from person to person ended successfully, in the future Blundell's positive result alternated with failures.
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Of the first eight patients, doctors died four - that is, the effectiveness of the developed method was at first 50%.
Blundell meticulously recorded the course of the manipulations and their consequences. Four types of monitoring have been developed: the general condition of the patient, the volume of blood drawn, the continuity of the infusion, and the state of the heart. The obstetrician noted that after the transfusion, the person "begins to warm up the body, and he is clearly getting better." If before Blundell physicians invariably used arterial blood, then the Briton used venous blood in his experiments. Its qualities were found to be more suitable for blood transfusion.
In one of his works, Blundell highlighted the main hazards and complications of the operation: blood clotting, which interferes with transfusion, as well as air embolism, and blood incompatibility in some cases.
He was the first to describe the symptoms of complications after surgery - trembling in the body, anxiety, nausea and abdominal pain.
Blundell later invented the tools for his operations. The fruit of his efforts were two devices - with the use of one, blood was transfused under pressure, the other helped to carry out the process under the influence of gravity.
James Blundell Blood Transfusion Instruments.
“The person who is taking blood is given the only operation - an ordinary venesection, and the person who is receiving blood is just an operation to insert a small tube into a vein, as is done for bloodletting,” the doctor explained.
And yet the method remained almost exotic, and therefore was applied in exceptional circumstances, when there was nothing to lose. In the period 1820-1870, only 75 cases of blood transfusion were published in the world literature. By 1875, the number of successful blood transfusions rose to 347.
In Russia, the pioneer of blood transfusion was the St. Petersburg obstetrician Andrei Wolf on April 20, 1832.
He saved the life of a woman in labor with bleeding by receiving a transfusion from her husband using Blundell's methods. An epochal event for our country took place at the modern address Lermontovsky Prospekt, 9.
“On Friday, Holy Week, I was invited to a poor woman,” the obstetrician himself described the premiere. “Having let go of her burden a few hours before, she was already struggling with death from extreme blood loss.
Embraced by the cold, almost without any pulse, she continually rushed from one side to the other and was like dying from the rampant Eastern cholera.
With such a desperate situation of an almost dying woman, I immediately decided to resort to blood transfusion and thereby saved the life of the mother of a large family.
Wolf had no titles and worked as a simple practicing physician under the guidance of Academician Stepan Khotovitsky, a supporter of blood transfusion. It is possible that the patron arranged for Wolf a business trip to London for an internship with Blundell.
Attempts to conduct blood transfusion were made before the British obstetrician. In 1795, an American Philip Sing Physicist performed a person-to-person transfusion. And in 1667, parallel experiments were recorded by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Denis and the Englishman Richard Lower. Both, having very primitive ideas about the properties of blood, unsuccessfully tried to make a transfusion from a sheep to a person. Their experiments were even banned at the legislative level due to the high mortality of the experimental and negative reactions in society. Earlier in the 17th century, scientists transfused blood from dogs to dogs. Some operations allegedly ended successfully, but there is no official confirmation of this.
In 1628, Englishman William Harvey first described the circulatory system in the human body.
His work allowed the next generations of researchers to begin the development of blood transfusion techniques.
The positive influence of someone else's blood on well-being was noted by the people of the ancient world. So, in the works of ancient Roman writers, cases are mentioned when elderly patricians drank the blood of dying gladiators in the hope of rejuvenating. Hippocrates was convinced of the effectiveness of treating mentally ill people with the help of blood.
And Pope Innocent VIII in the 15th century tried to recover from a serious illness (most likely from the consequences of a heart attack) by drinking the blood of three ten-year-old boys specially killed for this. However, the legend is probably an element of the propaganda of the pontiff's ill-wishers. Nevertheless, cases of taking someone else's (often children's) blood to improve well-being in the Middle Ages did occur.