Medicine: For a Dog's Life

"Many practitioners have been awed by the terms 'blood transfusions' and 'blood banks,'" said the clinician gravely. "They have felt them to be either too complicated and impractical or too expensive for routine use." The speaker described how easy it is to obtain blood from a donor under anesthesia, and store it for as long as three weeks. "There is no substitute for whole blood," he concluded. "Proper evaluation and correction of the surgical patient's needs will hasten recovery [and] lower the mortality rate."

The speaker was no M.D., no practitioner of surgery on humans, but Ralph E. Witter, a doctor of veterinary medicine, describing a new frontier to fellow vets in convention at Atlantic City. The patients he was talking about: dogs.