Historical Overview of Immunohematology Immunohematology is one of the specialized branches of medical science.

It deals with the concepts and clinical 2 techniques related to modern transfusion therapy. Efforts to save human lives by transfusing blood have been recorded for several centuries. The era of blood transfusion, however, really began when William Harvey described the circulation of blood in 1616. In 1665, an English physiologist, Richard Lower, successfully performed the first animal-to-animal blood transfusion that kept ex-sanguinated dogs alive by transfusion of blood from other dogs. In 1667, Jean Bapiste Denys, transfused blood from the carotid artery of a lamb into the vein of a young man, which at first seemed successful. However, after the third transfusion of lambs blood the man suffered a reaction and died. Denys also performed subsequent transfusions using animal blood, but most of them were unsuccessful. Later, it was found that it is impossible to successfully transfuse the blood of one species of animal into another species. Due to the many disastrous consequences resulting from blood transfusion, transfusions were prohibited from 1667 to 1818- when James Blundell of England successfully transfused human blood to women suffering from hemorrhage at childbirth. Such species-specific transfusions (within the 3 same species of animal) seemed to work about half the time but mostly the result was death. Blood transfusions continued to produce unpredictable results, until Karl Landsteiner discovered the ABO blood groups in 1900, which introduced the immunological era of blood transfusion. It became clear that the incompatibility of many transfusions was caused by the presence of certain factors on red cells now known as antigens. Two main postulates were also drawn by this scientific approach: 1. Each species of animal or human has certain factor on the red cell that is unique to that species, and 2, even each species has some common and some uncommon factor to each other. This landmark event initiated the era of scientific based transfusion therapy and was the foundation of immunohematology as a science.