First Blood Transfusion
The first known blood transfusion took place on June 12, 1667, when Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys successfully injected sheep blood into a 15-year-old boy. Blood transfusion is a medical procedure that involves transferring donated blood into a patient's bloodstream, typically to replace blood lost due to injury or illness. Initially, transfusions were rare and often met with skepticism, especially as European physicians for centuries practiced "bleeding," which involved drawing blood in an effort to cure ailments. This approach often exacerbated patients' conditions. Although Denys's early transfusion yielded positive results, subsequent attempts had mixed outcomes, leading to his eventual cessation of the practice. It wasn't until the 19th century that doctors began experimenting with human blood transfusions, facing challenges related to blood compatibility. The advent of blood typing in the early 20th century significantly improved the safety and efficacy of transfusions, establishing them as a routine and life-saving procedure in modern medicine. Today, blood transfusions are a critical component of medical treatment, having saved millions of lives worldwide.
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First Blood Transfusion
First Blood Transfusion
The first known blood transfusion was performed on June 12, 1667, by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys, the personal physician to King Louis XIV of France. He injected nine ounces of blood from a sheep into a 15-year-old boy, and the procedure was a success.
Blood transfusion involves the injection of donated blood into the bloodstream of a patient, typically one who has lost much of his or her own blood because of injury or disease. Today it is a routine procedure and has saved millions of lives, but it was not perfected until the 20th century. In fact, for many centuries European physicians practiced an opposite procedure called bleeding. The patient was cut and blood drawn, in the misguided belief that this would remove poisonous fluids from the body or relieve a high temperature. Of course, all it did was make the patient worse. Such was the case with Denys's patient, who had been bled many times in a vain effort to relieve his fever. Denys was lucky and the boy recovered, but some of his later patients were not so fortunate, and he was eventually ordered to stop using transfusions in his treatments.
It was not until the 19th century that doctors started attempting transfusions of human blood into patients, and they experienced limited success. Dr. Thomas Blundell of London, England, was the first to try it, on September 25, 1818, but his patient died. Later, Blundell and other doctors were able to save some patients by means of transfusions, but the procedure was far from reliable because of blood incompatibility problems. When blood typing and the identification of major blood groups became possible in the early 20th century, the success rate skyrocketed, and transfusions became both a safe and a widespread practice in modern medicine.