Blood transfusion and the World Wars

This article summarizes the remarkable development in the science and practice of blood transfusion during the 20 years either side of 1900, progressing through the challenges of surgical vascular access, the propensity of shed blood to clot and the more mysterious apparently arbitrary acute reactions (later revealed as due to blood group incompatibility), to describe in more detail, the developments at the Western Front, then giving a précis of the advances in the interwar years through to the mid-twentieth-century 'blood-banking'.