THE ORIGIN OF BLOOD BANKS
For hundreds of years physicians and surgeons drew blood from sick patients to improve their health. Today’s doctors still remove blood, though now from healthy individuals, and transfuse it back to the sick. Sporadic attempts at transfusion go back at least to the 17th century, but with little success. Transfusion service as we know it had to await further knowledge of the physiology of shock, the discovery of blood groups, the development of sterilization techniques, and the prevention of blood clotting.
By the 1920s blood clotting was the primary unsolved problem. Clotting often frustrated the transfer of blood by syringe from donor to recipient. Devices to connect an artery of the donor directly to a vein of the patient prevented clotting but required a surgical 
Kit for citrated transfusion, early WWII, used by Geoffrey Keynes,
surgeon, British Army, and brother of John Maynard Keynes. See diagram
below (Courtesy National Archives, U.K.)
procedure. In 1914, Albert Hustin, in Belgium, announced the use of sodium citrate as an anticoagulant. In the U.S., Richard Lewisohn, working on the same problem, published on the use of a 0.2% solution of citrate in Surgery, Gynecology, and Obstetrics in 1915, a time when WWI was raging. Oswald Robertson, from the Rockefeller Institute, joined Harvard’s Base Station Hospital in France with the assignment to study shock. He noted the favorable results in shock of direct person-to-person transfusions by the British. He devised an apparatus to collect blood in a citrate and glucose
Robertson's apparatus for citrated
transfusion (From History of the Great War
Gordon-Taylor, KB Walker, eds, Hathi
Trust)
solution to prevent clotting, permit storage, and eliminate direct transfer. Transfusion centers, precursors of blood banks, were set up in underground bunkers where blood was drawn, cross-matched (though type O was used preferably), and sent to surgical stations. Direct transfusions became obsolete.
After the war, as doctors increasingly used transfusions, donors generally received money for their blood and hospitals tried to find healthy ones. Private collection agencies sometimes were less choosy. But there was always a cost, and if one could not afford a transfusion in a hospital, it often was not given. The depression of the 1930s worsened the financial issue.
Patients at Cook County Hospital in Chicago usually lacked financial resources. Those without family or friends as donors might die without needed blood. To remedy this, Dr. Bernard Fantus, 
Bernard Fantus (Wikipedia)
director of therapeutics, instituted a novel approach. Blood transfusions fell under “therapeutics,” allowing Fantus to create a system that he termed a “blood bank,” a name deliberately chosen. Blood donors established an account, just as in a bank. If the donor needed blood for himself or his family, he could withdraw the amount deposited to his “account” at any time. Meanwhile, his deposited blood could be given to another person, who was then liable for repayment by him/herself or a proxy. Blood was drawn from healthy donors, patients in congestive heart failure (before taking digitalis!), healthy prepartum women, and elective surgery patients. The hospital kept ledgers with separate columns for debits, credits, and balances, the accounts maintained for each hospital department. The blood, typed and tested for syphilis, was stored in labeled citrated bottles and refrigerated. Febrile reactions, not uncommon and usually due to sterilization and cleaning defects, almost vanished with careful attention to detail. Other centers, the Mayo Clinic, for example, also stored blood for future use, but the “bank” concept began in Chicago.
Fantus, often called the “father” of blood banks, published his experience in the JAMA in 1937, a widely read report that encouraged hospitals elsewhere to form similar banks, including the L.A. County and Detroit Receiving Hospitals. Eventually communities opted in.
As WWII began, England needed blood desperately as it coped with the blitz. An organization was formed in New York City to deliver blood and later plasma, called “Blood for Britain.” On the west coast, two San Francisco physicians, John Upton (born in England) and DeWitt Burnham, founded the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in 1941 to collect blood for British and American use. It operated in the William Irwin mansion on Washington St. (Now replaced by Washington Tower Apartments.) Blood was collected in the mansion’s ballroom, most of it made into plasma that was stored in the wine cellar. Plasma was considered an adequate substitute for blood at the time and was much easier to ship.
Six months after Irwin Blood Bank’s founding, on December 7, the Japanese bombed Honolulu. Bernice Hemphill, a certified bioanalyst and the wife of a naval officer, volunteered the next day at the Honolulu blood bank, learning how it functioned. In 1943 she moved to San Francisco and volunteered at the Irwin Bank.
Bernice Hemphill (from her oral history,
see Sources, U.C. Library, Berkeley)
The staff at Irwin, recognizing Hemphill’s talents, appointed her as managing director of the bank. When the war ended, the Red Cross, that had been the nation’s major blood-collecting agency, continued in this role, a function that overlapped with Irwin's. A turf battle erupted, Hemphill maintaining that the bank system, operating at a community level, was preferable to a broad, “quasi-governmental” (her term) organization. Working with Dr. Upton, the two stimulated the foundation of new community blood banks (one in Sacramento began in 1947), and worked to organize the national American Association of Blood Banks to resist the Red Cross and to coordinate business and scientific information on a national basis. Hemphill also conceived the idea of a “clearing house,” similar to that of money banks, where incoming and outgoing blood could be coordinated. It was headquartered at Irwin. Many have considered Hemphill as the “mother” of blood banking.
Blood banking is here to stay. Modern surgery could not exist without it. Although many factors contributed to its growth, blood banks could be said to have two “parents.” Bernard Fantus conceived the “bank” system and Bernice Hemphill expanded it to the broader community by creating the “clearing house.”
A link to an index of all the essays is available at:
SOURCES:
Swanson, K W, Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America. 2014, Harvard Univ Press.
Starr, D, Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce. 1999, Alfred A. Knopf.
“California Blood Bank Society: The Early Years.” At: https://www.cbbsweb.org/page/CCBSTheEarlyYears
The Mother of Blood Banking: Irwin Memorial Blood Bank and the American Association of Blood Banks. Oral History of Bernice M. Hemphill. 1998, Regents of the University of California. Accessible at: https://archive.org/details/motherbloodbank00hemprich/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater
Fantus, Bernard, “The Therapy of the Cook County Hospital.” JAMA 109 (2): 128-131.
Schneider, W H, “Blood Transfusion between the Wars.” J Hist of Medicine 2003; 58: 187-224.
