Transfusion medicine. The evolution of a new discipline.

Abstract

BLOOD banking is an archaic term. It should be discarded. If this seems too radical a step to take in the 50th anniversary year of the American blood bank, perhaps the term should be given a gold watch and nudged into an honorable retirement. The bank analogy, connoting a place to deposit, store, and withdraw blood, no longer suits the scope of services and direct patient care responsibilities offered by present-day transfusion centers. During the past quarter of a century, a complex clinical and research discipline has quietly emerged from blood banking. This new discipline projects a different image and deservedly has acquired a new name— transfusion medicine . Blood banking was an American innovation and one that revolutionized medicine. When Bernard Fantus established the first blood bank at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1937, the scientific principles for rudimentary blood storage had already been described 1 ; however, practical guidelines