Modern Blood Donation History: Truly a Wartime Effort
Have you donated blood lately? Maybe you’ll get inspired by reading the history of how we got modern blood donation, including (of course) the bloodmobile.
Recently, my wife has really gotten into putting on blood drives, in no small part because of their ability to save lives — by making the iron-laden resources already running through our veins and arteries available to people who need them just a little bit more.
These blood drives, quite often, happen in public places. You don’t have to go to the Red Cross; the Red Cross will come to you.
Which means that, much like computers, you need to make blood donation stations portable. Possibly on wheels.
Let’s look unto the roots of blood drives and the bloodmobile, which we assume is what the inside of Vampire Weekend’s tour bus must look like.
1628
The year that the circulation of human blood was discovered by English physician William Harvey. Harvey, who spent much of his life trying to understand this process of blood flow, helped create the initial building blocks for blood transfusion. In fact blood transfusions were tried not long after Harvey’s discovery, though it would take nearly 200 years for a human-to-human blood transfusion to be successfully completed — an endeavor pulled off by American physician Philip Syng Physick, who is also nicknamed “the father of American surgery” and is also credited with inventing soda in 1807. (Hopefully he didn’t invent soda and American surgery at the same time.)
Before we had blood banks, we had a cottage industry of on-call blood donors
The problem with blood transfusions, for many years, was preservation.
Once it was clear that blood transfusions between one person and another could be done, this opened up a number of other questions — about compatibility, about safety, about how to maximize this process.
