Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Blood Transfusions

Episode Date: January 20, 2015

This week on Sawbones, Dr. Sydnee and Justin are selling all their blood. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers (http://thetaxpayers.net)

Saabones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, three, four! We came across a pharmacy with a twin that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth. Wow! Hey everybody, welcome to Saw Bones, a male tour of Miss Guy to of misguided medicine undercoaster Justin McElroy and I'm sitting McElroy welcome to the show city Thank you Justin No, I'm not I'm here like at literally every week, but it's so spent one half of the the marital But misguided marital, but it always feels special for me when you're here because you're very special to me. Well, thank you, honey.

No problem. That's sweet of you. What are you trying to get something out of me? Is that what all this? No, it'll be silly. Well, the sweet talk end is about, that usually means you want to buy something that I don't want you.

Okay, what do you, what do you want to buy? I don't, I don't want to buy anything. On an unrelated note, okay, I would very much like to buy a new version of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset so I could What now it's a Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. It would let me get lost in my favorite games and get swept away by the Magic of digital entertainment. You have so many video games though, already so many different in like systems. And there's like, we have like a whole

to tool, it's a gateway. Automum full of controllers like cube, table of digital entertainment. Oh, I have a whole extra TV in my house just for all your video games. It's two TVs you start to your head and suck you into a world of virtual entertainment. That's like magic and it's just a few hundred dollars and I would like very much to buy

it to please. I don't approve of that and a few hundred dollars. I just don't think, I mean, we're a family now. We have a child to raise. I just, fine. Fine, I will raise the money on my own. Are you going to have like a lemonade stand? A lemonade stand, car washes and Car washes and a sexy get up.

Oh. Something I could do. Okay. All right. It's a little cold for that. It's January. Yes. Do you have any other better ideas?

I could sell my blood, sell my blood, sell my plasma. You're gonna sell plasma. Didn't college? Can't know why I can't do it. do is a 33 year old father of five month old I mean you and how motor you can you can I don't know why you could yeah, I mean I can raise you a dollar Whoa figure they'll give me 30 bucks per pint. I got nine pints Quick man, you're just gonna.

Yep, Oculus. No, wait, well, I mean, like, how quickly are you planning on? Oh, what? Oh, no, you can't sell all your plasma. All at once. Like, you can't do it all at once, like, guys. All I still for a while afterwards. No, well, no.

I'll have a fruit roll up in a little Debbie and a orange juice. So we find. Is that what they give you? I see those things. No, well no. I'll have a fruit roll up in a little Debbie and I'll wish you something fun. Is that what they give you? I see. All those things? I did get a little Debbie when I gave. That's a schmarris board. Not all those things.

I think that would send you into shock, but you do get a little Debbie if a memory service was a star catch. Not one of the superior little Debbie's. No, no, I agree. Now, like the oatmeal cream pie thing. That's good stuff. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, I agree. Now, like the oatmeal cream pie thing. Oh, that's good stuff. Yeah.

But anyway, yeah, I'm not selling my blood. Okay. Well, you can't sell all your blood. You can sell blood, but you can't sell all of it at once, because you die. Can I just get more blood from the hospital? Well, okay. I don't think you understand blood transfusion very well.

I doesn't sound like me, but go on. Yeah. Maybe we need to talk a little bit about like blood transfusion and blood donation and then maybe we can put this to bed. You'll still let me sell all my blood. No. It seems like a good idea at the end of the episode. Okay, sure.

If it seems like a good idea at the end of the episode. Agreed to disagree. So first of all, I wanna to thank a couple people who have recently suggested this topic, Amy and Jennifer. A lot of other people have tweeted and emailed, I think, periodically to suggest this. So thank you to everyone else who I'm not mentioning. So let's talk about it.

Hit me. When we start doing this? Because it seems like something that, it seems mechanical enough that we would have started experimenting with it fairly early. You know what's interesting is that it took us a while to understand the circulatory system. So you understand what blood transfusion is.

Right. Well, you take blood out of one person what blood transfusion is. Right. Well, yes. You take blood out of one person and put it in another. Sure. Pretty straightforward. But you don't just like pour it into the other person. Like, you know, you have veins and arteries and capillaries. I can't swallow it.

Right. You have like a whole circulatory system that the blood has to get into. Right. Well, the idea of the circulatory system was something that people had to figure out before they could figure out how to put blood into somebody. Does that make sense? I guess you can, before you knew that it, like, refilled, you might worry that if you gave away some of it that you wouldn't get it back.

Yes, absolutely. And you also would have to identify that you need more blood that that is ever a problem. Right, that it's not just the sort of goopy filler. Exactly, exactly. I mean, we thought that blood was one of the humors, and we actually thought that it burned up in the heart over time. Oh, okay.

That's small. So you wouldn't necessarily know to put more blood into people. The first attempts weren't until the 1600s, and that was because that was when British physician William Harvey first described the circulatory system, you know, in depth. I mean, we had some inkling of it before then, but really understood this process of circulation and the process. And then, intensely, it was a little time as possible between understanding something and then messing with it. Exactly. As soon, I think that's a good point, as soon as we figured out the circulatory system, we were like,

what can we do to screw this up? Right. Most of the attempts early on were pretty much failures, resulting in an either complete like ex-sanglination. So you just lose all your blood. Okay. Because I mean, part of it was, where do you put the blood, you know, and how do you get it out of the other person. This usually involved on one end or the other attempting to sever an artery.

And that's the bad. I'm not good. Not a good look. So a lot of the, a lot of the early attempts, they people blood to death or if they did manage to get blood from one person and into another, they would have some sort of reaction because their blood types are incompatible because we didn't know about blood types. blood to death, or if they did manage to get blood from one person and into another, they would have some sort of reaction because their blood types are incompatible because we didn't know about blood types and then the person would probably die. It's interesting because even before we figured out how to actually put blood in the proper place in the circulatory system, we did think that putting blood in another person had some

healing powers. And I think we talked about this actually briefly in a couple of the other episodes we've done. The idea of like drinking somebody's blood. Marie Levo from New Orleans and the third season of American Horror Story did this. She sure took the blood of young people and i think slaves in her case and uh... rev them on herself to give herself youthful powers and you see a lot of i think we mentioned this before like vampire myths come from some of the practices uh... people drinking blood we talked about like

when someone was executed when someone had their head chopped off that people would stand around with cups in their mouths open, hoping the blood would fly into their mouths to cure them. Remember we spoke about this in another episode? The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, all drank blood for healing. None of this was because somebody needed blood, though. I mean, like, understand, it was just like the healing properties of blood. Pliny advised it. Our favor.

Of course he did. Pliny the elder. He advised both drinking blood and bathing in blood is a great idea. I mean a Pliny Stinger for our show. And he like like a shocked dog's have. Like that's so Pliny. Like that.

Could it be better than that? Let's open up the Pliny pack. Pliny pack. I don't like that sound you make at the end. No, I don't like that. We'll have to work on it. Well, that'll be, we'll fix that in post. Yeah, come on. Totally that. We'll follow that right out. Come up with something else. All together, completely. We'll have something fun. I'm sure someone else has something fun. A fun, plenty stinger. Um, but people would use it for everything from just like aches and

pains to epilepsy. So it had nothing to do with like your lacking blood, you need more of it. But I thought this was interesting. I did find there was a specific mention in the 13th century that it was good to drink blood or to bathe in blood, you know, for different illnesses. But you had to be careful where you got the blood because it could really mess you up if you got the wrong blood. And this is one of the quotes I found, he who drinks of menstrual blood,

or that of a leper, will be seen to be distracted and lunatic, evil-minded and forgetful, and his curse is to drink of daisies, powdered, and mixed with water of honey, and to bathe in tepid water, and to copulate with girls, according to the law, natural, and to play with pretty girls and young boys. And the antidote is to eat serpents whose heads and tails have been cut off with the edge of a palm frond. So some of that doesn't sound like a curse.

No. Some of it's okay. Because part of it was like getting down. That that's your. And young boy, play with pretty girls and young boys. Yeah, but then part of it was, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, Like maybe there are other ways to get blood into your body other than trying to drink it or rub yourself in it. William Harvey, it's interesting,

did not attempt transfusion himself, even after figuring out the circulatory system, but he did figure it out by pumping water through a dead man. So that's kind of, I don't know if you consider that a transfusion. It's a weird afternoon though. Yeah. What'd you do today at work?

I'll be, pump one through a day, guy. Oh, same old, same old. I was trying to weaken the Bernism because I don't know anything. And I'm around in 1600s. But I know weakened the Bernies. But I know weakened the Bernies. Rufus, the top child from Bill and Ted.

I know about Bill and Ted too. He told me about weakened the Bernies. So I was trying to burn his in, and I didn't work. You could be surprised to hear it, nothing happened. The first kind of attempt was in 1652 when there was this crazy vecker who thought he would try to transfuse a chicken from another chicken. Yeah, go for it.

But there's not really any, like, it's not recorded very well. He didn't present it exactly as like a case study and transfusion. So I don't really know how it turned out. So we'll just, we'll just chalk that up to who knows if that's true or not. Maybe I don't, I don't even know if the chicken was sick. I just wanted to do it. You just like, like I can trade chicken, but that sounds like something you do and you're

really drunk. That's the same reason people call him Everest, you know, because it's there. Why did he transuse that chicken? Why did he do this? What if you dealt with your day? She just caught up on Gilmore girls. As long as there are chickens to transfuse,

I will be transfusing chickens. For whatever reason. In 1655, so soon thereafter, physician Richard Lower decided he was going to try it out with a dog. So he bled a dog almost to death. And then he basically tied an artery of another dog to an artery of the first dog. Just kind of tied them together, like not nodded them, but you know what I mean?

Like tied the edges together. How'd that go? The both dogs lived. Success. There you go. Medical miracle. These are not recommended experiments to do on animals. I should know.

Maybe you need dexter types out there when thinking about giving them a little role. Please do not try to bleed a dog to death. And unfortunately, because this was successful, dogs all over had to run in fear, because a lot of people started experimenting on dogs. I guess just because it worked once, so why not try dogs again?

And also Sarah McLaughlin wouldn't be born for several hundred years afterwards, so it was not a lookout for them. There were a lot of writings from Sir Christopher Ren, who was a scientist and a famous architect at the time and generally just a big time genius. People took a lot of his ideas on the kind of instruments he used, he described different methods of doing it and how to do it without causing the dog to bleed to death and that kind of stuff.

People took his ideas and started doing all kinds of weird stuff. Like instead of just transfusing blood to blood, like they would transfuse opium into dogs or like wine or beer. I don't know. Beer? Ale. This is my dog.

His name is Party Boy. He is the sweetest dog, the coolest dog ever. And I filled him with beer. His blood is beer and his name is party boy. He is the sweetest dog the coolest dog ever and I filled him with beer. His blood is beer and his name is party dog party boy. Sorry party boy the dog Sounds like an awful thing that was done in a frat Nothing gets frat but like science frat. I think we got we got way too drunk and we Transfused beer into our dog. I hope the dog was okay. I'm sure the dog, I'm sure party was fine. I lived a rich, fulfilling hour to 90 minutes. If I ever let you get a dog, we are gonna name

a party boy, right? Yeah, absolutely. We're not gonna fill him with beer. Not gonna fill him with beer. So the animal experiments continued. And especially in 1667 with the court physician to King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Dines, who was really into sheep blood.

That was kind of his thing. So everybody was trying with different animals. And he wanted to try transfusing the blood of a sheep into people. Because we'd worked so far animal to animal, so why not try animal to people? Both red. Both sheep and people are red. The blood.

Oh, okay. Both their blood is red, give it a whirl. Have you seen sheep blood though? I haven't, have you? No, but I assume it's red. I mean it's red, right? It's red. Why would other color would it be?

Don't go kill a sheep. Don't kill a sheep. So anyway, there was a four there was a 15-year-old boy who was suffering from feverish. So the thought was that since sheep are so cool and calm, if you take the blood of a sheep and transfuse it into the boy who's got the fevers that he'll be fine afterwards. That worked okay. He actually lived. And I will say that from the descriptions, it sounds like he was taking relatively small amounts like with a syringe, you know, removing a small amount of blood from the sheep and injecting it into the human.

He repeated it later with somebody else with sheet blood who was also sick and that worked as well. And both of them not only lived to tell the tale of their sheet blood transfusion, but they also both said they felt a little better. Specifically, when the second guy that he did it with kind of talked about like, after he had it done, his arm felt warm and he felt like he had energy and he felt invigorated. Oh, God. I think he was having a little bit of a transfusion reaction probably.

His arm probably did get warm. Well, there'd be no living with humans now. Now that we think we can get a momentary bit of pleasure from sucking blood out of sheep. This is the new normal. This is the new normal. This is the new strike drug. This is the next crocodile.

Sheep blood. And you know what's interesting is that it was preff, it was preferred at the time. Like nobody was thinking of using human blood. They were all using animal blood partly because it was thought that human blood could be made impure by our actions. So your blood could be impure because of your vice

or your passion. And you wouldn't want to put that into another person. Okay. However, things kind of went off the rails when he tried to kill or when he tried to cure, I should say, a very ill man. He was also very naked. He had had a psychiatric episode of some sort that we obviously didn't understand back then and was running through the streets of town naked basically. So he decided he would cure him by giving him blood from a cow because cows are so gentle.

Okay. Yes. And so he gave him a transfusion. It did not work so well and that guy unfortunately did die. Ah. And the doctor was charged with murder. Whoa, good job, old timey people. This gets weirder, so he was charged with murder.

I'm, let's just take a moment. I'm, that is surprisingly responsible. I'm super proud of them. Well, I'm glad that somebody went in you, you, what you injected him with cow's blood? Listen, I know it's 1667, but you know you can't just kill naked people, right? Yeah, I don't care that he's running around the street.

Like, that's not okay. It's not okay. So anyway, he, but he was cleared of charges. They didn't, they didn't convict him, but as a response to that, he quit medicine. So he stopped practicing. Yeah. which was probably going to be a hard, hard to jump up business at that point.

The weirdest part is that if that's not weird enough, in the long run, it was revealed that the reason the guy was probably already having problems is that his wife had been slowly poisoning him with arsenic for a while. Okay. Just as a weird afterthought. But as a result of this, in France, they banned animal to human transfusion. That's okay. I mean, that's an understandable, you know, we cook the, uh,

kill the gong goose, I guess, with that last one. Literally, we took its blood out. We're having so much fun. Having a blast. Shooting up our sheep's blood. And then just went one set, two, five. And then all Jean-Baptiste had to ruin it with the cow's blood and the naked guy. You know what's interesting is that there were also some beliefs at the time that if you

used animal blood and a human that it would change their species, but they were doing it anyway. But you would think that would have- But that didn't happen right? No. There were accounts where people would say like, and then they gave her some cat blood. And she seemed very feline like afterwards, which, you know, whatever. Um, it was, so at the time, it was mainly used very

sporadically anyway. So this wasn't like a big loss to medical practice. It was mainly used for like mental illness or maybe marital discord. It was proposed sometimes that you use. And I mean it was the same idea like give them a sheep or a cow's blood. Something that's calmer than a human and then it'll calm them down. Although there was a theory that if you trans-floor, a transfused blood from a husband to a wife or vice versa, it would fix their marital problems. But it was really... Is that real? No we're not going to do that. No. I'm giving it a whirl.

No. We have to fix this. We're not going to do that. Please. No. Distance. I don't know what you have. What?

I'm not taking your blood. What kind of vices and passion are you going to give me? Passion for virtual reality. A deep burning desire is to have inside that digital farchway and see what lies beyond. I don't want that. Fair enough. And that was the main reason that they,

like I said, the main reason they weren't using human blood yet, even though it probably would have worked better, is that there was a thought that you could pollute a person with the personality and the spirit and the... Makes sense. I mean, it doesn't make sense, but it makes a kind of sense. I think it's hell. I mean, you're still coming off the humorous theory

where like these different fluids in your body influence your... To their defense. I mean, in one of those cases where like we were kind of right before the wrong reasons, you know, we, there were, you know, diseases that could be passed from person to person. So, you know, not doing it willy-nilly was probably smart.

Right. Now, we didn't understand that. No, but like, we just didn't want to give somebody like the urge to try to solve it. Like, we had the right idea, you know, to make it the wrong justification, I guess. Right. No, you're right. You're right. But, you know, one thing, and I read this and I thought this was a really good point,

all throughout this time period, it was really hard to get anybody on board with the idea of transfusion in general because what was the most popular treatment? Uh, transfusion, or, no bloodletting. Yes. Yes. So, why would you want to put blood in somebody when... You're just trying to get it out. Yeah, when most of the time physicians were trying to get the blood out.

That's your problem. You got too much blood in there. If you look at pictures of people being transfused at the time period, you'll often see them being blood from the other arm. Tell me we started getting the hang of this. Well, eventually we did, but before I tell you more about that, Justin, I'm going to need you to come on down to the billing department with me. Let's go.

Okay, said, when did we start getting the hang of this? So in 1818, the first person to person transfusion was successful, and that was done by obstetrician Dr. James Blundel, who had been kind of unfortunate. It really is. It doesn't sound like he's gonna do this right Dr. James Blondle Can I take your blood out of your body and put it in another body? I'm James Blondle Yeah, I'm good. I'm good I know it's okay. I'm a licensed physician

Dr. James Blondle It's 1818. I'm already rolling rolling the dice with doctors as it is anyway. Should I pick one with a cooler name? But I've got a name you could trust. Dr. James Blundo. So he'd been experimenting with this whole idea for a while. But it really came to a head when one of his patients he was an obstetrician started having

a severe postpartum hemorrhage. So after she gave birth, she started bleeding, they couldn't get her to stop. And that at the time would have been a death sentence for many a woman. However, he transfused her and she survived. I'm a hero. I'm a hero Dr. James Blunder, hero. He wrote out, he wrote up about 10 of these cases and half of them went well. Five of them, you know, that's pretty good rods at the time.

50% hero, I'm a half hero. And to be fair to him, two of the people who didn't survive were already dead when he started transfusing them. So I do my best with what I have, which is blood. It should also be noted that while he was transfusing the patients, he did bleed them all. Well sure. Wait a minute, what? Yes.

I told you that was a common thought. It was out with the old. We didn't know how it worked, but we knew bloodletting was our thing. I'm sorry, old timey people, I try to give you a bit of a doubt, but you really thought that the good thing to do, I put in blood in, would be to take other blood out. Hey, if you haven't listened to our episode on bloodletting yet, I would recommend you do. It's kind of a good foundation for everything else we ever did in medicine. Fair enough. So at this point, he started arguing that transfusion

was a thing that would actually help people. Some half of his patients had benefited from it. A woman who would have died otherwise survived. So he started pushing this idea, but people were pretty resistant to it. Like any new thing in medicine. And especially when we were so used to taking blood out of people instead of putting it in. A study came out at the time, as well as we did studies, that reviewed all the cases of

transfusion that had been done and found a survival rate of about one in three. And they noted that, you know, this isn't quite as good as a hernia operation at the time, but it is about the same as amputation, so maybe you should go for it. Now, would one third about work out to difference in blood typing? That's so hard to say, because you're talking about it's not just the percentage of the population who has a single blood type. That math is too advanced for me. Right. It'd have to be the chances that they had either your same blood type or another one that was compatible, which we'll talk about in a minute.

You know, because you don't have to necessarily have blood from the exact same blood type as you. So how to do it was a big problem. You know, even those people who agreed that it was a good idea, you know, we tried tying an artery from one person to the vein of another, which would work, but was very dangerous and you risked the person whose artery was severing bleeding a great deal. We tried bleeding people into like

basins and then sucking it up into syringes. We even just tried to kind of like take a bunch of sharp points and like, macerate the skin on a person's back and then collect what we thought was capillary blood. This was that surface blood. Yes. Not a cool, like not a lot of people lining up at the right cross back then. I would imagine. No, no, I don't think they gave you cookies or juice or anything when they did this stuff. They gave me a very soft cushion to lie back on. And as you can imagine, getting the blood out was a problem and then also if you did put it into like a bucket or something it would probably start to clot and that was a big problem too because then what did you do?

In the late 1870s it was a trend for a while to try to transuse milk So like somebody's really sick you just start you hook them up to an IV of milk and start running that in excellent just start, you hook them up to an IV of milk and start running that in. Excellent. There were lots of reactions to that. So by 1884, they replaced it with saline, which is actually something we still use today, not so much to replace blood, but as a volume replacement, yeah. You know, that's standard IV fluids now. Awesome.

Good work, guys. The real breakthrough was in 1901 when Carl Lanschneiner discovered blood groups. And I should note, there were a ton of physicians involved in this process, figuring out not just what the blood groups were, but how to find them and how to figure out who's what, and what that means, and how to test blood for that. He was by far not the only physician involved. There were many,

many. Can you give me like a bird's eye view of like blood types? Like what, what that actually means? So what it has to do with is what kind of antigens you've got on your red blood cells? The water antigens. A little like surface proteins that can cause a reaction. So the idea is that if I have antigens, A antigens on my red blood cells, which I do, because I am blood type A. And you give me blood type B blood. You have formed that person with type B blood, let's say that's you. I don't know what type your blood is I don't need it. We need to figure that out. It wouldn't hurt. You have antibodies against my antigens Mmm. So you're gonna try to destroy my blood cell. I'm gonna see your blood as a hostile invader Exactly and vice versa. I have antibodies against your blood cells So you can imagine when you put those blood cells in my body, we're both gonna have problems

Is that gonna be fatal or is it yes Yes, it can be fatal. It depends on how much blood you get, how severe the reaction is, and then nowadays it would depend on what kind of support you could give the person. This stuff does accidentally still happen, and it depends on how quickly basically you can get this person to an intensive care unit. Okay. So that's generally the idea. There's A, B, A, B, meaning you have both. And then O, meaning you don't have any of these antigens on your blood cells. And the great thing about type O blood is that for that reason,

you're not forming, you can give this blood to anybody because they don't have antibodies against anything on those blood cells, so they're not gonna attack it as an invader and you're gonna get that blood. Can they take any blood too? No. Ooh. No.

They can only take O blood. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So O is the universal donor, and AB is the universal receiver. If you have type AB blood, you can get blood from A, from B, or from O. The other thing to consider, of course, which wasn't figured out for about another 40, 50 years, was the RH typing, which is if you're positive or negative.

So, you know, like I'm a positive, that means that I have the RH factor, which is just another, again, antigen on the blood cell kind of thing. Don't worry so much about what it means. The important thing is that it has to match if you're positive. Okay. No, if you're negative. Okay. Strike that reverse. It has to match if you're positive. If you're positive. No, if you're negative. Strike that reverse. It has to match if you're negative.

If you're positive, you can get negative or positive blood. If you're negative, you can only get negative. You got it. You make sense. Sorry. So it took a while for everybody to catch on. There were still a lot of people who were using outdated matching and grouping systems that people had theorized

but were wrong about all the way up until the 30s. It was interesting in World War I, we also figured out because as you can imagine, all of a sudden, it became necessary to transfuse blood. We figured out how to preserve blood. We figured out how to keep it from clotting because some of our early methods were killing people.

And that's when we figured out the RH typing. And as a result, after that, as we move into the 30s, we see the rise of the first blood banks, which was really important by World War II, when we were collecting mass amounts of blood to have on hold for the soldiers, there's actually a program in the US first called Plasma for Britain,

where we were collecting plasma to, you know, ship overseas and give to the British. Should we reply? I have the same typing restrictions. Yes. But then after that, we created our own blood-banking kind of systems for use in the US as well, and civilian use. A big thing was in the 50s when we replaced glass bottles with plastic bags to hold blood.

That was a big deal, as you can imagine, because it's a lot easier to store and transport plastic bags. Yeah, I can see that. So it was a lot harder to have mass quantities of glass bottles that you shipped, you know, places. And we refined the testing. We first started testing for syphilis and then soon after that we started testing for syphilis, and then soon after that, we started testing for hepatitis B. In 86, we started testing for HIV and in 91, we finally started testing for hep C.

And now we can test for a lot of different illnesses, you know, in your blood, before we would give it to somebody. So it is very unlikely that you would get any of these illnesses from a blood transfusion. Nowadays, we also of course cross-match blood, so not only for instance in the hospital or we're gonna pick a blood type that matches yours, but we're probably gonna mix it together as well and make sure that we don't see any reaction to unknown antibodies

because there are things in your blood that we don't necessarily know about ahead of time or test for because they're uncommon, that can cause transfusion reaction. As you mentioned, we can get plasma, we can give platelets, we can give red blood cells, some good facts for you to know. Every blood donation can save up to three lives because we can divide it into the different parts. About 38% of the US population is eligible

to donate blood based on their health status and age and everything, but less than 10% does. And why that's important is because every two seconds someone in this country needs blood. So I don't know, we've been doing this show for like 35 minutes, you do the math. That's a lot of people. So if you are interested in donating blood just so you kind of know, because some people have asked about different things that they check for, you go in, you'll have a brief health history taken,

they'll check your vital signs, they will check your hemoglobin, if you're anemic, they don't want you to give blood, because you're already anemic. And then they actually take your blood and they'll test it for infectious diseases afterwards. And if it is positive, they won't use it. And of course, then they'll call you and let you know.

The whole process takes about an hour for you. And like Justin mentioned, do you get juice or cookies or snack cakes or something as a result? Not that you couldn't obtain this on your own. Should you, should you say desire, but it's a nice book. But it's a really good idea to do. It's, you it's it's very rewarding. Have you ever given blood Justin? I have yes. I did to impress a girl in high school. I need to go back. I know did it work Not super well because I didn't get married to her, but I

I think that worked out well in my in my opinion I think that worked out well in my, in my opinion, in my humble opinion. That, I mean, that specific effort didn't work in the grand scheme of things. It absolutely did. Folks, thank you so much for listening to our podcast. We are here every Tuesday. Thanks the Maximum Fun Network for having us

on their, their, their family of programs. A lot of great stuff you listen to. And you should call Pop Rocket, which is a bunch of really smart people talk about the events and pop culture of the week. A lot of fun to listen to. So check that totally out. We also have other great shows like a stop podcast yourself and the Goose Down, Judge John Hodgman, memory palace, a risk. My brother, my brother and me. Thank you so much, dear. And also the Adventure Zone is a new D&D podcast that my, myself and my brothers do.

It's a lot of fun. People seem to like it. So check that out. Thank you to the taxpayer for letting us use their song, Medicines. Thank you to all of you for, for tweeting about our show. We're at Saul Bones on Twitter, so thanks to Dr. Adam Avatar, Lindsey Marie Ezel, Shadow Name Podcast Rob Weeks,

Madeline Cordova, Rob Kiles, Brian K. Eason, Samantha Karek, Mark Davis, Jeremy Baker, Rick Bros, Joel Mathis, Matthew Domville, so many others, Thank you so much. We super appreciate it. And that's good to do it for us. Until next week, I'm Justin McRoy.

I'm Sydney McRoy. There's always don't drill a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone Listener Supported