[Illustration: Fig. 1.--BLUNDELL’S IMPELLOR
From _Researches Physiological and Pathological_, 1824]
A more general interest in the subject was revived in England by the work of James Blundell, lecturer on physiology and midwifery at St. Thomas’s and Guy’s Hospitals. He published in 1818 his earliest paper on experimental transfusion with a special form of syringe invented by himself. His first apparatus consisted of a funnel-shaped receptacle for the blood, connected by a two-way tap with a syringe from which the blood was injected through a tube and cannula into the recipient. His experiments were performed upon dogs, and he began by drawing blood from the femoral artery and re-injecting it into the same animal through the femoral vein. He then conducted a long series of investigations into the properties of blood, the effects of its withdrawal, and the resuscitation of an exsanguinated animal. Soon he had opportunities of transfusing patients with human blood, and the results are recorded in his paper of 1824. His apparatus had by then been elaborated, and an engraving of his _Impellor_, as he termed it, is reproduced here. It consisted as before of a funnel-shaped receptacle for the blood, but the syringe was now incorporated in one side of the funnel, and contained a complicated system of spring valves, which caused the blood to travel along the delivery tube when the piston was pushed down. The Impellor was fixed to the back of a chair in order to give it stability.
All the patients transfused by Blundell were either exceedingly ill, or, judging from his description, already dead, so that his results, considered statistically, were not favourable! Nevertheless, he was not discouraged, and stated his “own persuasion to be that transfusion by the syringe is a very feasible and useful operation, and that, after undergoing the usual ordeal of neglect, opposition, and ridicule, it will, hereafter, be admitted into general practice. Whether mankind are to receive the first benefit of it, in this or any future age, from British surgery, or that of foreign countries, time, the discoverer of truth and falsehood, must determine.” Blundell’s work has been described in some detail because, after the experimental work of the seventeenth century, the year 1818 may be taken to mark the real beginning of the clinical application of blood transfusion.