Blood Transfusion

A landmark work from 1922 documenting one of medicine's most transformative procedures. Geoffrey Keynes, who helped pioneer safe blood transfusion techniques, provides a meticulous account of how physicians finally learned to transfer blood between human beings without killing their patients. The text captures a pivotal moment in medical history, when transfusion moved from desperate gamble to reproducible science. Keynes details the indications, techniques, risks, and physiological principles that made this possible, offering modern readers a window into the birth of transfusion medicine. Though written in dense academic prose typical of early 20th-century medical literature, the book reveals the audacity and care of doctors who cracked one of the body's most guarded secrets. For anyone curious about how modern medicine came to be, or the story behind the blood bank that now seems so ordinary, this century-old text remains a remarkable artifact.