RENAL INSUFFICIENCY FROM BLOOD TRANSFUSION

Abstract

From 1667, when the first blood transfusion was given to man by Jean Baptiste Denys,¹ until the discovery of hemagglutination by Landsteiner² in 1901 and the classification of blood groups by Janský³ (1907) and Moss⁴ (1910), hemoglobinuria was accepted as a common accompaniment of the injection of blood intravenously. In many of the patients who showed hemoglobin in the urine renal insufficiency developed, and death followed. Since testing the donor's and the recipient's blood for agglutination has become common, the incidence of severe complications from blood transfusions has, fortunately, greatly diminished. Hesse and Filatov^18a reported a mortality of 1.3 per cent from 750 transfusions in Leningrad. They estimated that in general the mortality in various clinics was between 0.5 and 1.5 per cent. Tiber⁵ (1930) reported 2 deaths from 1,467 transfusions (0.013 per cent) at Bellevue Hospital. Witts⁶ described 3 deaths in 3,430 transfusions in Great