The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

By the time World War II broke out just two decades later, banking, matching, and transfusion had become common practices in the field. Compared to the First World War, the mortality rate of wounded soldiers who reached a field hospital nearly halved—due partly to blood transfusions. In the early 1940s, the United States, aided by the American Red Cross, launched a nationwide program for blood donation and banking. By the end of the war, the Red Cross had collected thirteen million units of blood, and within a matter of years, the US blood system had fifteen hundred hospital-based blood banks. There were forty-six community donation centers, and thirty-one regional centers to donate blood. As one writer put it in a 1965 issue of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, “War has never lavished gifts on humanity; an exception may be made for the impetus and popularization of the use of blood and plasma… attributable to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Korean conflict.” Perhaps more than any other intervention, transfusion and banking—cellular therapy—stands as the most significant medical legacy of the war.