By Fernando Del Corro 
On June 15, 1667, 354 years ago today, the French doctor Jean Baptiste Denys performed the first blood transfusion to human beings, something that marked a momentous milestone in the history of medicine since after those little more than three For centuries and a half, the application of this procedure saved the lives of millions of people around the planet, especially from the new possibilities opened up by the Argentine doctor Luis Agote at the beginning of the last century.
The circulation of the blood, until then unknown, had been discovered in 1666 by the English doctor Wiliam Harvey, although it had already been known about it since 1200 when the Syrian doctor Ibn Al Nafis spoke of the subject, and later, in 1666, another doctor and English physicist, Richard Lower, practiced the first transfusion between animals, which encouraged Denys to practice it between human beings, something that was perfected over the years but always directly between the donor and the recipient who were interconnected. .
Like so many other great contributions made by Argentine scientists, it is almost unknown that the extraction of blood from a healthy person to be injected later into a sick person, after conservation, was a technique developed in our country by Luis Agote who on November 9, 1914 Using sodium citrate, a salt of citric acid extracted from this type of fruit, he performed the first transfusion using blood previously taken from a donor.
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The conviction that the blood of healthy people can help heal ills of others goes back a long way, even before knowing about its circulation. A recorded antecedent dates back to 1492 when Pope Innocent VIII, the presumed progenitor of Christopher Columbus, during the same year that he arrived in America, fell into a coma. In that circumstance, three children, ten years old each, were hired via chaplain Johan Buchard to donate blood. It was given by mouth to the pontiff who died, as well as the children. In any case, the question of blood donations has remained present in medicine since then.
Blood was already assigned a key role in human health since ancient times, as about a thousand years before our era in China, during the Nei Jing dynasty, it was said that “blood encloses the soul.” In Mexico the Aztecs drank blood in their sacrifices as an offering to the gods to obtain more strength and courage. The Greeks assigned great fertilization to the earth to water it with it and believed that it purified the spirit of who was anointed with it. For this last purpose, the Romans practiced taurobolim, bathing people in ox blood. Also human medicine until the XIX century practiced bloodletting, even through the use of leeches.
The English physician Christopher Wren, in 1656, was the promoter of intravenous drug injections. When Denys transfused the blood of lambs into humans in 1667, there was great questioning after some failures, so the French courts prohibited this practice, which delayed progress on the matter for centuries. In any case, with the passage of time, successes were achieved by transfusing blood directly between people until that great advance contributed by Agote from Argentina was reached.
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Agote, born on September 22, 1868 in today’s Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and died in the Buenos Aires town of Turdera on November 12, 1954, in addition to being the first doctor in the world to perform indirect blood transfusions, via sodium citrate also had an important political intervention between 1910 and 1920 in the Province of Buenos Aires, becoming a national deputy. As such, he was the author of laws including the creation of the National University of the Litoral, the annexation of the National College of Buenos Aires to the University of Buenos Aires and the creation of the National Board of Abandoned Minors and Offenders.
At present, on June 14 of each year, the “World Blood Donor Day” is commemorated to thank the unpaid voluntary donors, promoted by the World Health Organization precisely in tribute to Luis Agote for that first transfusion carried out in the Rawson Hospital of the current CABA.
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