June 15

I don’t know about you, but every couple of years I find it quite refreshing to hemorrhage internally so that I have to be given a whole bunch of blood transfusions. There is nothing quite as refreshing as a week in an Intensive Care Unit and I must confess that I have always found it to be rather invigorating. On the 15th in 1667, Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys performed the first blood transfusion, when he gave 9 ounces of lamb’s blood to a 15-year-old boy who had been bled, a commonly used method of treatment, far too often by doctors treating the child for a fever.