"Those who drag in the use of human blood for internal remedies of diseases...sin gravely."
Thomas Bartholin, professor of anatomy, 1616-1680
James Blundell (1790-1878), an obstetrician and gynecologist at Guy's Hospital, London, realized that blood transfusions offered a possible solution for women who suffered severe hemorrhage following childbirth. Blundell was familiar with the work of John Leacock, who, in 1816, had reported experiments in cats and dogs, establishing that the donor and recipient had to be of the same species.
The first human transfusion supervised by Blundell did not in fact involve an obstetric case, but a thirty- five-year-old man with stomach cancer. On December 22,1818, the man was transfused with about fourteen ounces of blood administered by a syringe in small amounts from several human donors. Despite a slight improvement, the patient died fifty-six hours later.
To facilitate transfusions Blundell devised an apparatus, known as Blundell's Impeller, consisting of a funnel and pump for the collection of donor blood for indirect transfusion into the veins of patients. Between 1818 and 1829, Blundell and his colleagues performed ten transfusions, of which only four were successful, and transfusion remained controversial.
In 1829 writing in The Lancet, Blundell himself reported patients who "suffered fever, backache, headache, and passed dark urine." With hindsight scientists now know he was describing ABO incompatibility. All became clear in 1900, when Karl Landsteiner, a doctor from Vienna, reported that the serum of some people agglutinated the red cells of others. From these experiments Landsteiner identified three groups, A, B, and C (later renamed 0). A fourth much rarer blood group, AB, was discovered the next year. Landsteiner suggested his findings might be applied to blood transfusions, but the idea was not taken up for more than a decade.
