Development of Safe Blood Transfusion

Blood transfusion became a practical clinical technique only after two separate problems were solved in the years around the First World War. In March 1914 the Belgian physician Albert Hustin performed the first non-direct transfusion using sodium citrate to keep the donated blood from clotting, a method refined later that year by the Argentine physician Luis Agote, and in 1915 Francis Peyton Rous and Joseph Turner at the Rockefeller Institute found that a citrate and glucose solution could preserve blood for storage of up to four weeks. That same year Rous and Turner also showed that testing a small sample of donor and recipient blood together beforehand could predict whether a transfusion would cause the blood to clump, turning Karl Landsteiner's 1901 discovery of the ABO blood groups into a practical safety check performed before every transfusion.