After Dr. Bernard Fantus’ healing powers in 1936 saved a woman’s life in Cook County Hospital, the woman’s husband asked if there was anything he could do for the physician as a token of gratitude.
“Uncle Bernard’s twinkly eyes lit up when the woman’s husband made the offer,” said Fantus’ niece, Adele Goldstein. “For years he had been trying to get money to put together his idea of refrigerating and storing blood at the hospital.”
For lack of a better term, he called his idea a “blood preservation laboratory,” but later named it a blood bank, thinking “bank” would more clearly convey its function to the public because it required blood deposits before doctors could make withdrawals for patient use.
It was, an admirer said 50 years later, “a simple but profound idea.” It also was a transformational idea that spread throughout the world quickly. Four years later blood banks would save millions of lives of wounded and injured in the violence of World War II. After the war, blood banks made possible new lifesaving surgeries and trauma treatments now considered routine.
The blood bank became the capstone to Fantus’ remarkable career, highlighted in an exhibit at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. Free to the public, it runs through Feb. 7.
Before blood banks, people needing blood for surgery or emergency treatment of injuries had to rely on family, friends or strangers — some paid, some volunteers — to come in and lie next to the patient for direct transfusions.
With blood stored and on hand 24 hours a day, emergency-room doctors and surgeons could work far more efficiently and effectively.
The idea of blood banking, for lack of funding, was going nowhere until the day the grateful husband came to see Fantus. It was the depth of the Depression, and County Hospital officials, skeptical of his blood-storage idea, wouldn’t give Fantus enough cash to start it up.
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Fantus lived mostly off his modest income as a professor and researcher, devoting his private practice to indigent patients who seldom paid for his service. He had little money himself, though he was nationally known for crusading against dangerous patent medicines and for inventing candy-coated pills for children.
“The [grateful husband’s] face turned white when Uncle Bernard said he needed $500,” Goldstein recalled. “`Why don’t you ask for something possible?’ he told my uncle. But he went away and came back triumphant. He went to 10 wealthy men and got each to pledge $50 to my uncle’s plan.”
Transfusions skyrocketed
Cook County Hospital physicians did about 40 transfusions a month before Fantus opened the blood bank March 15, 1937. Three months later, they were doing 300 transfusions a month and, a year later, 700 a month.
On July 10, 1937, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Fantus outlined for other hospitals the organizing principles of organizing a blood bank. JAMA regards it as one of the most important articles it ever printed, as hospitals all over the world quickly copied the idea.
They were well-established in London by the time German airplanes bombed the city in the “blitz” in 1940, saving thousands. After the war, doctors who had seen blood banking’s applications during the conflict used it to develop a wide array of new lifesaving procedures, from open-heart surgery to bone-marrow transplants to treatments for severe trauma.
“Almost any kind of modern surgery you can think of depends on the blood bank,” said Dr. Paul J. Schmidt, a physician who heads transfusion medicine at the Florida Blood Services in Tampa and who is historian for the American Association of Blood Banks. “If the blood supply wasn’t there, you couldn’t do the surgery.”
Fantus died in 1940 and never saw his project grow to the gigantic proportions it achieved.
Student standout
Born in Hungary in 1874, Fantus had completed pre-medicine studies when he moved to the U.S. at age 17 with his family. His father, a printer, bartered print work for admission to the University of Illinois school of medicine in Chicago.
Fantus was such an outstanding student that scholarships covered his medical-school expenses after his first year. For personal money, however, he worked in pharmacies, a job choice that later had positive consequences for U.S. public health practice and policy.
He received his medical degree in 1899 and in 1901 was teaching at his old school, specializing in therapeutics, training future doctors and researching appropriate uses of drugs and medications.
By 1911 he was front-page news, delivering lectures on the horrors of the patent-medicine industry, condemning brand names of popular but deadly nostrums.
“Many babies lie in graves as the result of morphine poisoning from swallowing soothing syrups,” he was quoted in a Tribune story, which noted eight babies dying from “`Kopf’s Baby Friend’ and four deaths due to `Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup.'”
He listed how much money each Chicago newspaper had earned in 1910 for knowingly advertising the sham medicines.
In the deadly worldwide 1918 influenza epidemic, Fantus exposed Chicago druggists, 80 percent of whom were selling victims dangerous, narcotic-based “remedies” that led to many deaths.
Children’s aid
His deep interest in pharmaceuticals led him to take lessons from a candymaker so that he could introduce more palatable candy-coated pills for children.
“In person,” his niece said, “he was so soft-spoken and gentle, with the kindest eyes I have ever seen.”
Goldstein said she had a baffling gastrointestinal condition that nearly killed her several times from early childhood until after she was married. It turned out to be Crohn’s disease, hard to diagnose then. Fantus kept finding new specialists for her, then carefully monitored their diagnoses and treatments, literally saving her life time and again when the diagnoses and treatments proved wrong.
“When I was 11, I was misdiagnosed as tubercular and was down to 59 pounds and starving to death because nobody knew my problem was a blocked intestine,” said Goldstein, 86, great-grandmother of 10.
“There were several times when it was only his steadfast dedication that kept me alive. I think he breathed life into me.”
He was famous nationally among doctors: considered one of the nation’s leading experts in therapeutics and pharmaceuticals, serving on federal standardizing boards, writing and editing 30 books, publishing constantly in medical journals.
He also was the visionary who pushed in the early 1930s to clear slums in and around a concentration of hospitals, clinics and medical and nursing schools surrounding Cook County Hospital. Put together in 1941, the 560-acre Chicago Medical Center remains the largest medical complex in the world.
Help from the dead
While pushing for the medical center, Fantus first got the idea for blood banks after reading about Soviet doctors using blood from cadavers as a ready supply for patients needing transfusions.
He had for years been frustrated by seeing critically injured patients die because they had no friends or relatives to donate blood.
His superiors vetoed the idea of using cadaver blood, but by 1935 Fantus and colleagues had a blood laboratory up and running as they experimented to find ways of keeping blood fresh on the shelf for a week or more.
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They built on several key blood discoveries earlier in the century. In 1901 in Vienna, a researcher discovered human blood types, and that they were not interchangeable. If a patient needed blood, doctors would have to know if potential donors had positive or negative blood, and Type A, B, AB or O.
In 1913 researchers solved the problem of blood coagulating outside the human body by mixing it with a solution of sodium citrate. In World War I, an American, Oswald Robertson, using sodium citrate, devised a way of collecting blood off the battlefield to treat wounded men at the front.
Cold storage
Experimenting with dogs in 1935, Fantus perfected a system of preserving blood for 10 days or longer with refrigeration at 4 degrees centigrade, mixed with a solution of sodium citrate.
Without knowledge of each other’s work, John Lundy, a Mayo Clinic physician in Minnesota hit on a plan similar to Fantus’ about the same time and began refrigerating blood for human transfusions. Fantus’ article in JAMA, however, widely spread the idea, making him the generally accepted “father” of blood banking.
Fantus died in 1940 in his Oak Park home from a heart attack. Cook County Hospital in 1941 named its outpatient clinics building after him, a name that remains today.
“He had this deep conviction that a scientist was to take no credit for his successful work,” his niece said. “He put all his time, attention and interest in helping needy people.
“Can you imagine the millions and millions of people who are walking this Earth today who would not be here if it weren’t for the blood bank?”