95 years ago, on the 23rd of March 1930, Soviet surgeons performed the world's first cadaveric blood transfusion.
In the early 1930s, the Central Institute of Blood Transfusion began research on transfusion of blood received from a deceased person. By this time, it was already known that in the first 6-8 hours after death the blood remains sterile and that red blood cells are still able to carry oxygen. At first, the blood clots, but after 30-90 minutes it becomes liquid and fibrinized again, which means that it does not need stabilizers. You can get 3-4 liters of blood from one corpse, while a donor can only donate about 350-450 ml of blood per donation. So as to not frighten the recipients, dead blood was called cadaveric (from Latin cadaver – corpse, dead body), then fibrinolysis. During this period, the surgical department of the Institute of Blood Transfusion was headed by a well-known surgeon, the founder of the Soviet Clinical School, S.I. Spasokukotsky, an ardent supporter and propagandist of this method. At the Central Institute of Blood Transfusion, the Laboratory of Experimental Therapy was headed by S.S. Bryukhonenko, the creator of the world's first artificial blood circulation device. He proposed to improve the technology of cadaveric blood exfusion, by taking blood directly from the heart. By 1935, 52 transfusions had been performed at the Institute.
But the story actually began a bit earlier, when, in 1928, the Soviet surgeon V.N. Shamov, who became famous for the first blood transfusion in Russia based blood group, was in the process of conducting new experiments. He transfused the blood of a dog that had died ten hours earlier into a test dog. The dog that received the blood survived. The story about this experiment at the III All-Ukrainian Congress of Surgeons in Dnepropetrovsk made a splash. The famous surgeon S.S. Yudin also heard it. He asked: Why wasn't the experiment repeated on humans? Shamov admitted that he did not risk it: in case of failure, prison awaited him, and positive results were not guaranteed. But this idea lit a fire in Yudin’s soul, and he understood: his fame and reputation would allow him to experiment on humans. He just had to wait for the right opportunity.
The opportunity presented itself on the 23rd of March 1930. A 33-year-old Muscovite tried to commit suicide by slicing his wrists. If he had been in another hospital, he would have died for sure, but the engineer was brought to the famous N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute. It was possible to save him via blood transfusion, but it would take at least four hours to wait for the blood of a living donor: there were no supplies in medical institutions at that time, because they did not yet know how to preserve blood. Meanwhile, the corpse of a 60-year-old man, who died of heart failure, was brought to the morgue, and Yudin took a chance. The 33-year-old patient was already in agony when the surgeon began the transfusion. Later, Yudin wrote that after the first 200 ml, “the patient turned pink, began to breathe calmer and deeper, and by the end of the blood transfusion, consciousness had fully returned.” A few days later, the would-be suicide was discharged from the hospital.
The indefatigable propagandist of the new method was, of course, S.S. Yudin, who exclaimed: “To divide death into fractions! Isn't that amazing?! If it is impossible to save the whole, then let's save at least a part! Mors vitae prodest (death benefits life). Even death itself can be used for the benefit of life!” Later, he put forward another bold idea – to create “superuniversal” fibrinolysis blood. If you add “universal” plasma of group IV to the “universal” erythrocytes of group I, then, Yudin was sure, you would get blood that would not agglutinate any other red blood cells, which meant that in emergency cases it could be transfused without first determining the recipient's blood group. But he did not manage to implement his idea. This was done by his student, the famous surgeon K. Simonyan. On the 16th of January 1956, for the first time in the world, he transfused 500 ml of superuniversal blood without first determining the recipient's blood group.
Beginning in the 1960’s, the N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute began to produce dry plasma from cadaveric blood and transfused from 140 to 200 liters annually. In 1960, 1,277 liters of cadaverous blood and only 307 liters of donated blood were transfused at the Institute. Throughout the 1960s, cadaveric blood was transfused throughout the Soviet Union: in Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), Donetsk, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Kiev, Kirov, Lviv, Minsk, Novokuznetsk, Novosibirsk, Odessa, Tashkent, Khabarovsk and other major cities of the country.
One of the most surprising facts about cadaveric blood transfusion in the USSR is that this method was only officially approved by the Ministry of Health in 1962. At the same time, Vladimir Shamov and Sergey Yudin received the Lenin Prize “for the development and implementation of the method of harvesting and using fibrinolysis blood.” Unfortunately, for both, the award was posthumous.
The Soviet Union remained the only country in the world to use cadaveric blood transfusion. The USSR has dissolved – the method has disappeared from practice, and there are no plans to return to it. New diseases, bacteria, viruses, and AIDS have appeared, and it is almost impossible to examine a corpse for all infections and diseases. In 2001, the Russian Ministry of Health declared the use of cadaveric blood inappropriate.
Illustration: “Portrait of Sergei Sergeyevich Yudin”, Mikhail Nesterov, 1933, oil on canvas.
Author of the text: Inessa Pleskachevskaya
