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Ibn al-Nafis discovered and describes the flow of blood to and from the lungs.
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Michael Servetus suggested that blood flows from one side of the heart to the other through the lungs.
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Fabricius published his work featuring the first drawings of vein valves.
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William Harvey published his work in which he explains that blood circulates within the body and is pumped by the heart.
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Jan Swammerdam was a 21 when he was the first person to observe red blood cells then decribe them.
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Richard Lower performs the first recorded blood transfusion in animals.
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Doctor Richard Lower and Edmund King gave Arthur Coga, a transfusion of several ounces of sheep's blood, which later Arthur recovered fully.
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Anton van Leeuwenhoek, provides a more in depth description of red blood cells, stating their size as "25,000 times smaller than a fine grain of sand."
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A footnote in a medical journal credits Philip Syng Physick with the first human blood transfusion, but his work is not published.
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James Blundell performs the first recorded human blood transfusion. He injects a patient suffering from internal bleeding with a suringe that consists of 12 to 14 ounces of blood from several different donors. The patient died after first showing improvment.
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Sir William Osler observed small cell fragments from the bone marrow make up the bulk of clots formed in blood vessels, which come to be called platelets.
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Dr. Reuben Ottenberg performed the first transfusion using cross matching, mainly eliminating transfusion reactions.
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Albert Hustin of Brussels and Luis Agote discovered that adding sodium to blood will prevent blood from clotting.
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Dr. Richard Weil descovered that blood that has been citrated can be refrigerated for a few days and still be successfully transfused.
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Francis Peyton Rous and J.R. Turner develop a solution that allows blood to be stored for a few weeks after originally collected and still remain useable for transfusion.
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Dr. Oswald Robertson established the first blood depot.
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Percy Lane Oliver began working a blood donor service out of his house in London.
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The Soviets were the first to establish a network of facilities to collect and store blood for use in transfusions at hospitals.
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Dr. Serge Yudin is the first to test transfusing humans with cadavar blood. His test was successful. He transfused a young woman with a 60 year old mans blood.
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Dr. Bernard Fantus comes up with the term "blood bank" to describe the blood donation center.
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Dr. Philip Levine and R.E. Stetson uncovered an antibody in the blood of a woman who's given birth to a stillborn that had not been discovered before. Because it was inherited from the father, it triggers the antibody production in the mother.
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Dr. Karl Landsteiner and Alexander Wiener discovered the Rh blood group.
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Edwin Cohn invented a method to separate out liquid plasmas different proteins.Through this process Cohn was able to isolate the plasma components.
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The American Red Cross agrees to organize a blood donor service to collect blood plasma for the war effort. The first center opened in New York on, and the Red Cross collects over 13 million units of blood over the course of the war.
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Dr. Paul Beeson links jaundice to blood or plasma transfusions the patients received a few months before they developed jaundice.
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American Association of Blood Banks held their first meeting in Dallas in November.
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Dr. Carl Walter created a plastic bag for the blood. Before this, the glass bottles that were used were susceptible to contamination.
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Dr. Max Perutz is able to understand the structure of hemoglobin- the protein within red blood cells that carries oxygen.
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Dr. Judith Pool, discovered that slowly thawed frozen plasma yields deposits high in cryoprecipitates are found to have much greater clotting power than plasma and given to hemophiliacs to stop bleeding episodes
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Dr. Baruch Blumberg identified a substance on the surface of the hepatitis B virus that triggers the production of antibodies.
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The first cases of AIDS were reported.
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Researchers isolated the virus that causes AIDS. They located it in the swollen lymph node in the neck of a AIDS patient and label it LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus).
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Dr. Robert Gallo announced that he identified the virus that causes AIDS, which he called HTLV III (human T-cell lymphotropic virus), at a press conference.
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After tons of Americans were infected with AIDS from the blood transfusions, the first blood-screening test to detect HIV antibodies is licensed by the U.S. government.
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There was a plasma shortage in Britain during World War II