Dr. Blundell: Revolutionary in Blood Transfusion

As Marcus Velleius Paterculus once stated deriving out of the dead language know as Latin, “Animo vidit; ingenio complexus est; eloquentia illuminavit”(“Live And Learn” 27). Its meaning proclaimed that these subjects he saw by the power of his mind; he comprehended them by his understanding; and by his eloquence he enlightened them,cast a brightness upon them. Relating to Dr.Blundell, this quote describes him perfectly because of his reasonable thinking. The year 1818 would go down in the books as the revolutionary era in British medical history, as well as all over the world. The complex procedure of blood transfusions including testing surgical strategies would save thousands of lives in the1800 as well as millions at this moment in time.

From a physiologist to an obstetrician, to a teacher and a physician led him to have different perspectives and apply it to his other occupations.Opportunity was endless for this doctor.These different faculties would open up James to be broad minded and have several achievements in medical art. From his first successful human to human blood transfusion, to the bisection of fallopian tubes during cesarean operations. Blundell's design structure was very genuine. Today's definition of a blood transfusion is the process of receiving blood into one's circulation intravenously. People with medical conditions that lost a lot of blood use this procedure to replace its lost components. To carefully test his hypothesis of blood being a nutritive property it was infused with what he called vitalism or in other words a living force, he found a couple to initiate his first stage to see if it fulfilled his needs. He used the patient's husband as a donor, took a syringe and extracted a measured amount of blood and transferred it to the donor's wife. “Between 1825 and 1830, he performs 10 transfusions, five of which prove beneficial to his patients, and publishes these results. He also devises various instruments for performing transfusions and proposed rational indications” (Highlights of Transfusion Medicine

He tested it by using it on different subjects, later then realizing that he should mainly focus the transfusion apparatus on women with heavy bleeding because of the results due to hard labor, also called uterine hemorrhaging. That same year Blundell would publish a paper stating his work“Experiments on the Transfusion of Blood by the Syringe”. This ingenious paper discusses his patient's experiences with a full term blood transfusion using a syringe on both Animals and Humans.”He addressed the benefits of rapid execution to prevent coagulation, the importance of avoiding air intake in the veins and the incompatibility of heterologous donors”(Adams)The importance of avoiding air intake in the veins had great significance due to the causing of air bubbles that formed in the veins, called an air embolism now, which could attack by stroke, heart attack, or respiratory