Efforts to save human lives by transfusing blood have been recorded for several centuries.
The era of blood transfusion, however, really began when William Harvey described the circulation of blood in 1616.
In 1665, an English physiologist, Richard Lower, successfully
performed the first animal-to-animal blood transfusion that kept exsanguinated dogs alive by transfusion of blood from other dogs.
In 1667, Jean Baptiste Denys transfused blood from the carotid artery of a lamb into the vein of a young man, which at
first seemed successful.
However, after the third transfusion of lamb’s blood, the man suffered a reaction and died.
Denys also performed subsequent transfusions using animal blood,
but most of them were unsuccessful. Later, it was found that it is impossible to successfully transfuse the blood of one species of animal into another species.
Due to the many disastrous consequences resulting from a blood transfusion, transfusions were prohibited from 1667 to
1818- when James Blundell of England successfully transfused human blood to women suffering from hemorrhage at childbirth.
Such species-specific transfusions (within the same species of animal) seemed to work about half the time but mostly the result was death.
Blood transfusions continued to produce unpredictable results until Karl Landsteiner discovered the ABO blood groups in 1900.
credit: © Kelly West