The First Ever Blood Transfusions.

ROBERT BOYLE 

The field of blood transfusion can rightly be said to have started in the 1660s.On the 17th December 1666, Richard Lower an Oxford   physician published a   paper in the Philosophical Transactions which described an experiment in where the procedure was carried out among dogs. The paper can be accessed from JSTOR. To be more precise, he informed the famous Robert Boyle about his work and he communicated this to the journal.  Incidentally, the Philosophical Transactions is the oldest continually published scientific journal in the world.   Incidentally, Aurangzeb still ruled India and the Jantar Mantar was not to be built until more than 50 years later.
The description of the experiment would have all the animal activists in the world up in arms. The carotid artery of the first dog was exposed and tied off distally and the proximal part tied with a ligature that could be loosened at will. A (goose?) quill was placed in this and this dog acted as the donor. The recipient dog had his jugular vein exposed and two quills were placed, one nearer the heart to receive the blood form the donor and a second one to drain blood away from the  dog. The bleeding continued until the first dog  began “ to cry, and faint, and fall into Convulsions,and at last dye by his side”.
The recipient was, however made of sterner stuff. This dog , if you  “sow up the skin and dismiss him and the Dog will leap from the Table and shaken himself and run away as if nothing ailed him “  Dr Lower planned to repeat this experiment, not on one dog, but  by bleeding several dogs into one and even several creatures into one . However the results of these experiments, if they were carried out are not known to us.
Boyle, in another paper published a few months later asked some pertinent theoretical questions about the experiments. The particular date of the issue in which he published his article  is perhaps wrongly printed  as February 11, 1666. Possibly it should be 1667.
Anyway, Boyle asked some important questions , 16 in number . I think it would be nice to see the actual facsimile  of the questions he asked  extracted from the Philosophical Transactions.






Of first human transfusions, a later post.  


Comments

Unknown said…

Very nice post here thanks for it .I always like and such a super contents of these post.Excellent and very cool idea and great content of different kinds of the valuable information's.

http://www.thinkittraining.in
June 21, 2016 at 9:19 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alexander Grothendieck: Mathematician Extraordinaire

Image
                                    The lion in winter: Grothendieck in old age  Mathematicians and theoretical physicists fascinate me. This is because, I can imagine myself, if I work hard enough, sometime solving a biological conundrum, or evaluating a chemical compound. But the idea of sitting with a piece of paper and pencil and calculating away for days or months or years and then coming up with a proof of an esoteric mathematical problem, or a theory to explain an observation made in deep space seems to me to be more like magic. Anybody who can do this, in my opinion is made of stuff that I cannot even imagine, let alone ever to hope to emulate. There are several such mathematicians. One of them passed away last November. I refer to Alexander Grothendieck who passed away on the 13 th of last month. Grothendieck was the mathematician par excellence. He embodied all that i...
Read more

The Uttar Banga Anath Ashram ( North Bengal Orphanage)

Image
Uma Mallick looks like an ordinary Bengali Housewife. She wears a standard cotton sari, vermillion on her forehead and travels clinging to her husband’s motorcycle as he whizzes past in Siliguri’s notorious lanes. However she is anything but that. Uma is the founder and the livewire of the Uttar Banga Anath Ashram (North Bengal Orphanage). Lest that makes you conjure up an image of a gleaming building full of well dressed children being looked after by an army of attendants, let me disillusion you. Her orphanage looks after girl children (she only takes in girls), and they are housed in a tiny postage stamp sized piece of land that was donated to her by a kind soul. Or perhaps not so kind soul, because the land was already occupied by a group of Mastaans, ( local goons) who could only be induced to vacate by a long and desperate struggle, involving a hunger strike by the children, and the help of local well-wishers. The house is basically a brick structure covered by a tin roof. There ...
Read more

Mamma Africa: Miriam Makeba and Malaika

Image
Today is the fifth death anniversary of singer activist Miriam Makeba. In our school days her songs were immensely popular; especially Malaika and Pata Pata which used to be bring to our staid Calcutta school the romance of Africa. She was one of the singers who made the sixties one of the most significant decades of revolt in the twentieth century when challenges to authority seemed to be a way of life. Miriam "Zenzi" Makeba was born in a suburb of Johannesburg in one of the crowded and deprived black townships of the apartheid era. Her father, Caswell, was Xhosa: her mother, Christina, was Swazi. Her given name Zenzi was derived from the Xhosa word Uzenzile, meaning "you have no one to blame but yourself". This was a traditional name intended to provide support through life's difficulties. When she was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested for selling umqombothi, an African homemade beer distilled from malt and cornmeal. Her mother was sentenced to a ...
Read more