then a transfusion of AB serum, which is free of antibodies, will suit any patient whatever their blood group.
Once all this was understood, it was easy to see why so many transfusions failed. Without knowing in advance the blood group of donor and patient, blood transfusion was a really hit-and-miss affair. At least that was the case in Europe. Stories that the Incas of Peru had been successfully performing a form of blood transfusion without any adverse reactions were initially dismissed as nonsense. However, when it was discovered that practically all native South Americans were in blood group O, it no longer sounded so incredible. If Inca donor and Inca recipient were both in group O, as most were, then trouble-free transfusions are exactly what would be expected.
Before the First World War, blood transfusions were a personal business. Willing friends and relatives of the patient would be tested to find someone in a compatibleblood group. The donor would then come to a hospital, usually the operating theatre if surgery was the reason for the transfusion, and be bled right next to the patient, who then immediately received the fresh blood. The huge increase of blood transfusions needed to treat the battlefield casualties of the First World War led directly to the setting up of blood banks and the recruitment of donors along modern lines. Under the right conditions it was found that blood could be stored for several days without losing condition and there was no need to transfuse casualties immediately with absolutely fresh blood.
Volunteer donors were bled at remote sites and the blood was despatched to the field hospitals at the Front to be matched and used as required. This soon became a large-scale activity and with it came the necessity for accurate records. Each army had its blood bank and they soon began to accumulate blood-group records from very large numbers of soldiers, each of whom was routinely tested in anticipation of being called either to give blood as a donor or to receive it as a casualty.
Hanka Herschfeld, from the Royal Serbian Army, was the medical officer in charge of the Allied blood bank on the Balkan Front. Her husband, Ludwig, had been one of the scientists who, before the war, had helped to work out the way the different blood groups were inherited. With this background it is no surprise that they became curious about the accumulating results from the blood bank. The Allies drew their troops from all over the world and the Herschfelds noticed that the frequencies of the blood groups in the soldiers of different nationalities were often quitedifferent from one another. Certainly they were still all either A, B, AB or O, but the proportions of each were different depending on where they were from. For example, far more Indian Army soldiers belonged to blood group B than did Europeans, who were, symmetrically, higher in the proportion of group A.
The Herschfelds interpreted these differences in blood-group frequencies as having something to do with the distant origins of these different nationalities – and they were right. But in their now famous paper published in the leading medical journal the
Lancet
, just after the war, they went too far and divided the world into two separate races. Race A came from northern Europe, while Race B began in India. The varying blood-group proportions seen in the soldiers of different nationalities were explained by the mixing as people flowed outwards from these ‘cradles of humanity’, as the Herschfelds called them, to populate the world.
Their
Lancet
paper is a classic, and rightly so. It was the first of its kind and it opened up an entirely new field of research in anthropology. It follows on from the implicit assumption in John Beddoe’s research on physical appearance that inherited features can be used to explore the origins of people. Compared to the work on hair and eye colour, skull shape and so on, blood groups come one step closer to the
Once all this was understood, it was easy to see why so many transfusions failed. Without knowing in advance the blood group of donor and patient, blood transfusion was a really hit-and-miss affair. At least that was the case in Europe. Stories that the Incas of Peru had been successfully performing a form of blood transfusion without any adverse reactions were initially dismissed as nonsense. However, when it was discovered that practically all native South Americans were in blood group O, it no longer sounded so incredible. If Inca donor and Inca recipient were both in group O, as most were, then trouble-free transfusions are exactly what would be expected.
Before the First World War, blood transfusions were a personal business. Willing friends and relatives of the patient would be tested to find someone in a compatibleblood group. The donor would then come to a hospital, usually the operating theatre if surgery was the reason for the transfusion, and be bled right next to the patient, who then immediately received the fresh blood. The huge increase of blood transfusions needed to treat the battlefield casualties of the First World War led directly to the setting up of blood banks and the recruitment of donors along modern lines. Under the right conditions it was found that blood could be stored for several days without losing condition and there was no need to transfuse casualties immediately with absolutely fresh blood.
Volunteer donors were bled at remote sites and the blood was despatched to the field hospitals at the Front to be matched and used as required. This soon became a large-scale activity and with it came the necessity for accurate records. Each army had its blood bank and they soon began to accumulate blood-group records from very large numbers of soldiers, each of whom was routinely tested in anticipation of being called either to give blood as a donor or to receive it as a casualty.
Hanka Herschfeld, from the Royal Serbian Army, was the medical officer in charge of the Allied blood bank on the Balkan Front. Her husband, Ludwig, had been one of the scientists who, before the war, had helped to work out the way the different blood groups were inherited. With this background it is no surprise that they became curious about the accumulating results from the blood bank. The Allies drew their troops from all over the world and the Herschfelds noticed that the frequencies of the blood groups in the soldiers of different nationalities were often quitedifferent from one another. Certainly they were still all either A, B, AB or O, but the proportions of each were different depending on where they were from. For example, far more Indian Army soldiers belonged to blood group B than did Europeans, who were, symmetrically, higher in the proportion of group A.
The Herschfelds interpreted these differences in blood-group frequencies as having something to do with the distant origins of these different nationalities – and they were right. But in their now famous paper published in the leading medical journal the
Lancet
, just after the war, they went too far and divided the world into two separate races. Race A came from northern Europe, while Race B began in India. The varying blood-group proportions seen in the soldiers of different nationalities were explained by the mixing as people flowed outwards from these ‘cradles of humanity’, as the Herschfelds called them, to populate the world.
Their
Lancet
paper is a classic, and rightly so. It was the first of its kind and it opened up an entirely new field of research in anthropology. It follows on from the implicit assumption in John Beddoe’s research on physical appearance that inherited features can be used to explore the origins of people. Compared to the work on hair and eye colour, skull shape and so on, blood groups come one step closer to the
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