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The Egyptians use bleeding to help their patients. A hyroglyphic in Memphis, Egypt,shows a patient being drained from the foot and neck.
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Empedocles, a Greek philosopher, believes that the organ of the heart and all matter is comprised of four "roots" (or elements) -- earth, fire, air, and water.
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Hippocrates, the physician of antiquity, theorizes that similar to the four elements, the body is made up of four ingedients -- blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile -- and their imbalance causes disease.
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Galen becomes one of the most important physicians in history. Dissecting and experimenting on animals, he proves that arteries contain blood, but also suggests that the system of arteries and veins are completely distinct, and blood forms in the liver and travels through the veins to all parts of the body and passes between the ventricles through pores in the septum.
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Hippocrates teaches the humoral theory, a hypothetical system to explain illness in which balance equals health. Excess or deficien- cy equals illness.
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Eminent Cairo physician and author Ibn al-Nafis discovers and describes pulmonary circulation -- the flow of blood to and from the lungs.
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Michael Servetus suggests that blood flows from one side of the heart to the other through the lungs instead of through the wall between the ventricles, which refutes Galen's theory.
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Fabricius, the anatomist from Padua, publishes his work ON THE VALVES IN VEINS, featuring the first drawings of vein valves.
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William Harvey introduces the controversial concept of circula- tion
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British physician William Harvey explains that blood circulates within the body and is pumped by the heart. Harvey experiments on animals and even on the surface veins of arms of living subjects.
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Jan Swammerdam is thought to be the first person to observe and describe red blood cells.
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Marcello Malpighi observes the capillary system which is the network of fine vessels that connect the arteries and the veins
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Jean-Baptiste Denis transfuses a teenage boy suffering from a persistent fever with nine ounces of lamb's blood. He attaches the lamb's carotid artery to a vein in the boy's forearm.
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Anton van Leeuwenhoek provides a more precise description of red blood cells, rouding their size to about "25,000 times smaller than a fine grain of sand."
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William Hewson details his research on blood coagulation, including his success at arresting clotting and isolating a substance from plasma he dubs "coagulable lymph." The substance is now more commonly known as fibrogen, a key protein in the clotting process.
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Philip Syng Physick with performing the first human-to-human blood transfusion.
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James Blundell performs the first recorded human-to-human blood transfusion.
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Identifies platelets.
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Sir William Osler observes that small cell fragments from the bone marrow make up the bulk of clots formed in blood vessels; these cell fragments will come to be called platelets.
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Karl Landsteiner dicovers A, B, and C, which he later changes to O. He charts the regular pattern of reaction that occurs when he mingles the serum and red cells of an initial set of six blood specimens.
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Alfred von Decastello and Adriano Sturli identify a fourth blood group -- AB -- that causes agglutination in the red cells of both groups "A" and "B."
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Albert Hustin of Brussels and Luis Agote of Buenos Aires discover that adding sodium citrate to blood will prevent it from clotting.
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Pediatrics is the first comprehensive American publication on pediatric hematology.
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Thomas Cooley describes a Mediterranean hematologic syndrome of anemia, erythroblastosis, skeletal disorders, and splenomegaly that is later called Cooley’s anemia and now thalassemia.
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Alfred P. Hart performs the first exchange transfusion.
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Chicago’s Cook County Hospital establishes the first true “blood bank” in the United States.
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Dr. Louis Diamond along with Dr. Kenneth Blackfan describes the anemia still known as Diamond-Blackfan anemia.
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The blood product cryoprecipitate is developed to treat bleeds in people with hemophilia.
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The “butterfly” needle and intercath are developed, making IV access easier and safer.
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The role of platelet concentrates in reducing mortality from hem- orrhage in cancer patients is recognized.
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The first antihemophilic factor concentrate to treat coagulation disorders in hemophilia patients is developed through fractiona- tion.
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Hepatitis B surface antigen testing of blood begins in the United States.
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Apheresis is used to extract one cellular component, returning the rest of the blood to the donor.
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HIV is identified, but the virus has already decimated the hemo- philiac population.
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Blood can be tested for HIV, and heat-treated factor becomes available, making it safe to treat hemophiliac patients again without fear of patients contracting AIDS
