Blundell's first transfusion of human blood

Some months before February 1818, James Blundell was called to a woman sinking from uterine hemorrhage. She died within two hours of his arrival. Blundell, a lecturer in physiology and midwifery at Guy's Hospital, thought she might have been saved by refilling her vessels with a syringe. Transfusion had been set aside for about 150 years, since failed attempts in the 1660s to put animal blood into people.

He tested the idea on dogs. Dogs bled into collapse revived on another dog's blood, even after it had passed through a cup and syringe. Given human or sheep blood, they rallied but generally died within days, so Blundell held that people should receive only human blood. He credited his first notions to John Henry Leacock, a Barbadian who had reported similar animal experiments at Edinburgh in 1816. Henry Cline communicated the paper to the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London on 3 February 1818.

The first human patient, a man named Brazier aged between 30 and 40, had vomited most of his food for three or four months and lay emaciated at Guy's. His physician, Dr. Cholmely, proposed transfusion as a last resort, and Brazier was willing. On 26 September 1818 Blundell opened the right cephalic vein above the elbow. Gentlemen present gave blood, which he injected an ounce and a half at a time, ten times over: between 12 and 14 ounces in 30 or 40 minutes.

That evening Brazier's pulse was fuller and his lips reddened, and he said he felt much better and less faint. Next morning he asked for food and drank some porter. By the evening of 27 September he was failing, and he died about 56 hours after the transfusion. The autopsy showed a scirrhous pylorus. Blundell reckoned the man had lost at least a gallon and a half of blood during his illness, so the amount given had been far too small.

Most of Blundell's later transfusions were in women bleeding around childbirth, and by 1828 he could report two who recovered. He designed new instruments (the Impellor in 1824, the Gravitator in 1828) and advised taking blood from men, who fainted less. An American note later claimed the method had been used in Philadelphia about 30 years earlier, but no contemporary record survives.