If you were injured in the 19th century, doctors might have injected milk into your veins instead of blood. That actually happened.
It started in 1665, when Richard Lower performed the first successful blood transfusion, dog to dog. Two years later, he and French physician Jean-Baptiste Denys tried lamb’s blood on humans. It seemed to work, until one of Denys’s patients died and he was tried for murder. He was acquitted, but transfusions were banned across Europe for nearly 150 years.
Research resumed only in 1818, when James Blundell performed the first human-to-human transfusion. But outcomes were unpredictable, some patients survived, others died, and nobody knew why.
By 1854, desperate for a safer option, doctors tried injecting cow’s milk into patients during a cholera epidemic, believing its fat particles would become blood cells. It didn’t work. Headaches, comas, and deaths followed until saline replaced it by the 1880s.
The real answer came in 1901, when Karl Landsteiner discovered ABO blood groups, explaining why mismatched blood turned fatal. That single discovery finally made transfusion the safe, routine procedure it is today.
Two centuries of guesswork, one discovery. Does that make you wonder what else we haven’t figured out yet?
MBH/PS