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Eminent Cairo discovers the flow of blood to and from the lungs
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William Harvey explains how blood flows and circulated from the heart through the body.
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Jan Swammerdam is told to be the first to observe and desribe red blood cells.
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Richard Lower performs the first ever blood transfusion by taking a dog who's bled to death by connecting the jugular vein to a second dogs neck artery, causing the first dog to regain consciousness and live.
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Jean-Baptiste Denis transfuses a teenage boy with nine ounces lamb's blood because of a persistant fever. He connects the lamb's carotid artery to a vein in the boy's forearm, without the patient suffering bad consequences. Jean uses the procedure on other patients, until the death of his patient Antoine Mauroy.
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Dr. Denis sues Antoine Mauroy's widow for slandering his reputation. This causes the French Parliament to ban all human transfucions, England and Rome soon follow.
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Anton van Leeuwenhoek describes red blood cells, by approximating their size as "25,000 times smaller than a fine grain of sand."
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William Hewson specifies his research on blood coagulation, including his success at clotting and isolating a substance from plasma he names "coagulable lymph." The substance is now fibrogen, a protein in the clotting process
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A footnote in a medical journal gives credit to Philip Syng Physick, from Philadelphia who they say perfromed the first human-human blood transfusion. However, his work was not published.
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James Blundell performs the first recorded human-to-human blood transfusion. Using a syringe, he injects a patient suffering from internal bleeding with 12 to 14 ounces of blood from different donors. Although after some improvement, the patient did not survive.
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Sir William Osler discovers cell fragments from bone marrow makeup the clots formed in blood vessels. These bone marrow fragments will later be named platelets.
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Karl Landsteiner publishes his discovery of the three main human blood groups -- A, B, and C, which he eventually changes to today's O.
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Alfred von Decastello and Adriano Sturli discover a fourth blood type the name AB. AB causes agglution of both A and B's red blood cells.
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Dr. Ludvig Hektoen of Chicago suggest to check the blood of donors and their recipients for compatibility,cross matching, to prevent transfusion reactions. Dr. Reuben Ottenberg performs the first transfusion using cross matching, eliminating transfusion reactions.
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Albert Hustin discovers that adding sodium citrate to blood will prevent it from clotting.
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Dr. Richard Lewisohn, creates a formula of concentrated sodium citrate that can be mixed with donor blood to stop coagulation, but only has .2% danger to the recipient.
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Dr. Richard Weil determines that citrated blood can be refrigerated, stored and still successfully transfussed.
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Francis Peyton Rous and J.R.create a citrate-glucose solution that lets blood sit in storage for a few weeks and still be considered usable.
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Dr. Oswald Robertson collects and stores type O blood, with citrate-glucose solution, before the dealths during the Battle of Cambrai in World War I. By doing this he creates the first blood deposit.
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Dr. Serge Yudin is the first to test the transfusing of blood between humans and cadaver blood. His efforts are successful after resuscitating a young man by injecting him with 420 cc of blood from a cadaver of a 60-year-old man who has died. The Soviets are the first to create facilities to collect and store blood for use in transfusions at hospitals.
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Dr. Bernard Fantus comes up with the saying "blood bank" to describe the facilities that collect and preserve.
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Drs. Karl Landsteiner and Alexander Wiener discover the Rh blood group by experimenting with the red blood cells of Rhesus monkeys. They identify the antibody found by Levine and Stetson to be anti-Rh.
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Drs. Philip Levine and R.E. Stetson discover an unknown antibody in the blood of a woman who gave birth to a stillborn, and suspect that a factor in the blood of the fetus, inherited from the father, creates an antibody product in the mother.
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Dr. Drew devises a modern and highly sterile system to process, test, and store plasma for shipment of blood through the Red Cross.
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Dr. Isidor Ravdin successfully adds albumin to increase blood volume in Pearl Harbor victims.
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Dr. Paul Beeson links jaundice in seven cases to blood or plasma transfusions the patients receive a few months prior, creating the description of tranfusion-transmitted hepatitis.
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Dr. Carl W. Walter, produces for blood collection. The use of glass bottles prompted him to create a stronger and more portable container using plastic, which revolutionizes blood collection.
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Dr. Max Perutz unravls the structure of hemoglobin which is the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells.
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Dr. Judith Pool discovers that deposits called cryoprecipitates are found to have much greater clotting power than plasma. Cyro can be kept frozen at home and infused, after being thawed.
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The first cases of a syndrome initially called GRID (Gay-related Immunodeficiency Disease), due to its findings in gay men, are reported. GRID will eventually be renamed AIDS.
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Dr. Bruce Evatt suggest GRID (AIDS) may be blood born after findings in hemophiliacs also begin to develop.
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Dr. Luc Montagnier's lab at the Institut Pasteur discover the virus that causes AIDS. They locate it in the swollen lymph node in the neck of a Parisian AIDS patient, its names LAV.
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Dr. Robert Gallo of the NIH announces that he's specifically identified what virus causes AIDS in the swollen lymph node. He calls HTLV III (human T-cell lymphotropic virus),
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The ELISA test is adopted by all blood and plasma deposits to stop the spreading of AIDS and HIV antibodies.
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A series of more tests are created and distributed to screen donor blood for disease.