Under the knife
THE ADVANCES OF ANAESTHESIA, antisepsis-asepsis, and X-rays (pp. 48-49 and p.38) meant that by 1900 surgeons were developing a variety of new operations, techniques, and equipment to save lives and relieve suffering. But one restriction was blood loss. If a patient bled too much, life was endangered. Blood transfusions – substituting blood donated by other people – were unpredictable and sometimes fatal. In the early 1900s, the Austrian medical researcher Karl Landsteiner (1868-1943) tested many blood samples and discovered that not all blood was the same. He unravelled the intricacies of the ABO blood group system, thereby making blood transfusions much safer. Then in 1939 Landsteiner helped to identify Rhesus, another blood group system. At once the information was used in the first aid stations and field hospitals of the Second World War, and thousands of lives were saved with antibiotics (p.42). Yet despite these advances, the surgeon’s basic tools would still be recognized by a surgeon from ancient Greece or Rome (p.19).