19th Century Blood Transfusions

 19th Century Blood Transfusions 

In chapter 10 of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the character Lucy Westenra receives a blood transfusion in an attempt to save her life. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, blood transfusion is "a common, safe medical procedure in which healthy donor blood is given to you through an intravenous, or IV line inserted in one of your blood vessels. Blood transfusions replace blood that is lost through surgery or injury. This treatment also provides blood if your body is not making blood properly on its own" (NHLBI). But it wasn't always this way. Blood transfusion has an extensive history, and its usage has inspired many other discoveries in the medical field, and has also inspired literary works like Dracula.

Blood Transfusion from animal to human

The Beginning of Blood Transfusion

The first successful blood transfusion was between dogs in 1666 by English physician Richard Lower. This would never have been possible without medical breakthroughs of the time such as the discovery of full body circulation, pioneered by William Harvey, another physician. Harvey was the first to discover the full circulation of blood throughout the body through experimentation. On June 15, 1667, French physician Jean-Baptiste Denis preformed the first successful blood transfusion on a human being when he gave 12 ounces of blood from a lamb to a sick man. He recovered quickly, as well as Denis' next patient, but the following two transfusions failed- the third and fourth died after the transfusion.  (Encyclopedia Britannica).  

The fourth patient was a mentally ill man from Paris, and it was believed that a transfusion could replace his bad blood with good blood and 'cure' him (Eschner). The man underwent two transfusions, and died after the second. Denis was tried with manslaughter, and while it was later found out that the patient died of arsenic poisoning from rival physicians, blood transfusion was banned in France, followed by England (Encyclopedia Britannica). 

Entering the 19th Century

The frowned-upon nature of blood transfusions changed in 1818, when James Blundell became the first person to successfully transfuse blood from one human to another. According to Ben Richardson from the National Library of Medicine, "James Blundell saved the life of a women who was suffering from a postpartum hemorrhage by providing blood that came directly from her husband. In carrying out the procedure, Blundell demonstrated the practical validity of John Henry Leacock’s observation the year before that blood could only be reliably transmitted between members of the same species." (Richardson). Karl Landsteiner wouldn't discover the different blood types until 1901, so at this point, some blood transfusions were still fatal. Dracula was first published in 1897, meaning that the research about opposing blood types making transfusions possibly fatal hadn't been done yet.

This video explains several medical tools that would have been used by physicians like Van Helsing. At around 2 minutes, RTE News explains how the first blood transfusion in Ireland took place in 1865, 32 years prior to Dracula. The kit including the tools is shown as well. 

Attempted Blood Substitutes

Prior to Blundell's success, some doctors attempted to use milk as a blood substitute. In 1854, James Bovell and Edwin Hodder preformed the first milk transfusion. According to Big Think, "They believed that oily and fatty particles in milk would eventually be transformed into 'white corpuscles,' or white blood cells" (Davis). Their first patient survived, however the next five were fatal. 

Milk transfusion became a very popular, especially in North American tuberculosis treatments. Doctors continued performing milk transfusion although a majority of the patients would fall comatose and then soon pass away. One account of a woman with a lung disease states that she stopped breathing almost immediately after being transfused with milk. She miraculously survived through artificial respiration and injections of morphine and whiskey (Davis).

Blood Transfusion and Dracula

 Dracula's source of life is drinking the blood of others, so it was a good creative choice by Stoker to include blood transfusion in the novel as it was a common practice at the time. Perhaps he was inspired by Blundell's operation, as Lucy receives blood from Arthur, much like how the woman who Blundell saved received blood from her husband. This is actually quite likely, as three of Bram Stoker's brothers were physicians, one of whom eventually became the president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (O'Connor and Dunbar).  Since Stoker was in contact with his family, it is easy to assume that he may have asked them about the specifics of the transfusion to make the scenes accurate, however, we do not know this for sure. 

 

Works Cited

Davis, Matt. “19th-century medicine: Milk was used as a blood substitute for transfusions.” Big Think, 

    April 2019, https://bigthink.com/health/milk-transfusion/.

Elsholtz, Johann Sigismund. “Blood transfusion from animal to human.” Images from the History of 

Medicine (, Coloniae Brandenburgicae: Georgi Schultzi [and] Danielis Reichelii. 

Eschner, Kat. “350 Years Ago, A Doctor Performed the First Human Blood Transfusion. A Sheep Was    

Involved.” Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/350-years-ago-doctor-performed-first-human-blood-transfusion-sheep-was-involved-180963631/.

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. “Treatments for Blood Disorders.” Treatments for Blood 

Disorders, 2022, https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/blood-bone-marrow-treatments.

O'Connor, M., and N. Dunbar. “Bayesian Analysis of Blood Transfusion in Dracula.” Irish Medical 

    Journal, vol. 109, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-3. EBSCO.

Richardson, Ben. “Giving Life to the History of Blood Transfusion.” National Library of Medicine. 

https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2025/01/16/giving-life-to-the-history-of-blood-transfusion/

RTÉ News. Doctor's visit. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ07BZlZBpo&t=60s.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. "The Strange, Grisly History of the First Blood Transfusion".

Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Jun. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/story/the-strange-grisly-history-of-the-first-blood-transfusion. Accessed 24 March 2025.