The Sacred Pint

The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue. James Joyce

Following up on my blog of June 30, here’s more fascinating facts about blood. This time, what contribution war made to blood transfusion services. In Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood , Rose George shares, in reference to World War II, how “London’s authorities had spent years readying for calamity on all fronts. But they had not thought it necessary to prepare any blood.” Below are excerpts from her excellent book!

• In 1937, the English secretary of state for war had been asked what the nation proposed to do about a mass blood supply. He said, “It is more satisfactory to keep our stores of blood on the hoof.” He meant that the best way to store blood was how nature intended: inside a human body.

• By World War II, blood transfusion had been fully accepted by the British military, which planned in prewar years to set up an efficient blood supply to its forces and operated it extremely effectively. Field Transfusion Unit trucks carried refrigerators containing 1,100 pints of fresh whole blood. [This had a very short life span!]
• The actual emergency blood supply for London, a city of several million people, consisted of the stock kept by four London county hospitals for urgent maternity use: eight pints.
• Yet in wartime Barcelona, Frederic Durán-Jordà, a Catalan physician, had successfully pioneered the mass collection, storage, and delivery of blood. He made blood mobile, transporting it to the front line in glass bottles in a converted fish van. Blood was withdrawn, mixed with citrate solution, then bottled. Barcelona’s blood was good for eighteen days.
• We owe a lot to Percy Oliver: Oliver’s was the world’s first voluntary blood panel and the beginning of a shift to a model of altruistic blood donation in Britain that has endured one hundred years.

• Dame Janet Maria Vaughan was a British physiologist, academic, and academic administrator. She researched in hematology and radiation pathology. In early April 1939, during World War II, she gathered some medical colleagues in her Bloomsbury flat; they would change modern medicine. She initiated creation of national blood banks in London, setting one up with Frederic Durán-Jordà. She used a modified milk bottle for blood collection and storage.
• She used ice-cream vans full of her bottled blood through bombed and blacked-out streets. Most of the drivers were women.

• The war embedded the idea of blood donation in popular consciousness like nothing else had done.

• For British Major General W. H. Ogilvie, “the greatest surgical advance of this war, more important even than penicillin, is the development of the transfusion service.”

A departure from the topic of hemophilia, we are proud to promote…

This week we are taking a pause on the topic of bleeding disorders to share with you a very exciting project one of our team members has created!

Our editor of over 20 years, Sara Evangelos, has co-authored a young adult book titled Somewhere Besides Denver. We are so excited for Sara and this new book. Please read the synopsis below and check it out for yourself by visiting https://somewherebesidesdenver.com/

Denver, 1907: Three spirited teenage girls leave their homes on the prairie for a yearlong European Grand Tour. Violet and Marion, members of Denver’s social elite, yearn for more than society parties and safe marriages. Helen, a rancher’s daughter whose mother has abandoned the family, resents being an outsider. All three girls long to stretch the limits of what’s “suitable” for young women.

In Paris, the teens escape their chaperone and explore the city’s seamy side. Marion falls hopelessly in love with her drawing tutor, who has a history of breaking pupils’ hearts. Violet meets a chic clothing designer who encourages her to follow a career in fashion—and to ditch the corsets. In London, during the 1908 Olympics, Helen conducts a secret bicycle search for her long-lost mother, and the girls join the growing suffrage movement, barely escaping a melee at a women’s rights demonstration.

During their travels, the teens ride the Twentieth Century train and sail on the Lusitania. They meet a radical suffragette, two nosy gossips, a ground-breaking African artist, a fascinating photographer, and some fancy-dressed dogs in jeweled outfits. By the time they sail home to America, Marion, Violet, and Helen have found the confidence they need, at a time when women craved freedom—but men held the power. They decide to rebel against society’s rules, and to follow their own paths as women of the new century.

Visit https://somewherebesidesdenver.com/ for more information!

Give a Pint!

I love reading about medical history, and naturally blood is a fascinating topic. Rose George’s book Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood is snappy and witty, and full of facts. I loved all the statistics, interwoven with real life stories of individuals. I appreciate the focus on the suffering and plight of those with hemophilia, who contracted HIV and hepatitis C. I know some of the people she quoted. George has highlighted some very important and crucial concerns: plasma donation practices, cultural differences regarding blood. A chapter on leeches– so interesting! As I am involved internationally in helping patients in developing countries gain access to clotting factor, I was very interested in the global situations she presented, especially India and Nepal, two countries I have been to many times. Here are some highlights from the book, which I strongly recommend reading:

• Every three seconds, somewhere in the world, a person receives a stranger’s blood. Globally, 13,282 centers in 176 countries collect 110 million donations.

• The mythical Gorgon Medusa, with her head of snakes, showed the two-faced nature of blood best: the veins on her left side contained blood that was lethal, while the right side gave life. Transfusions can be two-faced, too. The right type of blood can save your life; the wrong one can kill you.

• The bone marrow produces two million red blood cells every second. Daily, the blood’s thirty trillion red cells do a full circuit of the body, traveling about twelve thousand miles.

• Forty percent of Caucasians have type A blood, but only 27 percent of Asians. 19 The fact that O-type people are more susceptible to cholera was first noticed in 1977.

• Cold War Americans thought blood type so important that they tattooed it onto adults and children.

• A nation-state needs 1 to 3 percent of its population to give blood to maintain an adequate blood supply, 36 the higher the better.

• In Luxembourg only 14 percent of people give blood; over the border in France, it’s 44 percent.

• A leech bite will usually feel like a vague sensation, not a nip or scratch. Once their teeth are engaged, they emit the best anticoagulants known to exist, so that their blood meal keeps flowing long after they have stopped feeding, often for up to ten hours. The leech is in many ways a simple animal, but its anesthetic and anticoagulant have yet to be bettered by science.

• In 1985, a three-year-old boy from Massachusetts had his ear bitten off by the family dog. He was taken to Boston’s Children’s Hospital, where his surgeons proceeded as they usually did with amputated ears. But the blood couldn’t circulate well in the tight ear area. Leeches were flown in and attached to the area. They drew blood away from the wound and kept the circulation to the newly attached ear.

• The first barber-surgeon on the registry of the Worshipful Company of Barbers was recorded in 1312. The bleeding barber is the reason modern barbers display red and white striped poles: the pole was a stick for the patient to grip; the white stripes were the bandages, the red stripes the blood.

More to come next time!!