Bernard Fantus
From Philosopedia
Fantus, Bernard (1 September 1874 - 14 April 1940)
Generally recognized as having established in 1937 what is now known as the world's first blood bank, Fantus opened a blood preservation laboratory at Chicago's Cook County Hospital.
He had been born in Budapest, Hungary (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
Fantus came to the United States in 1889, earning his M.D. degree from the University of Illinois in 1899. In 1934, he was director of therapeutics at Cook County Hospital. According to S. B. Moore's A Brief History of the Early Years of Blood Transfusion at the Mayo Clinic: The First Blood Bank in the United States (1935, during World War I blood had been stored by refrigerating it but in small quantities. In Russia, it had been a stored in blood depots in larger quantities. Fantus established a "Blood Preservation Laboratory” at the hospital, changing its name its name before launch in March 1937 to “Cook County Hospital Blood Bank."
He became a professor of pharmacology at the University of Illinois and editor for twenty-two years of The Yearbook of Therapeutics.
He was a signer of Humanist Manifesto I and the posthumous recipient in 1976 of the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Pioneer Award.
Fantus in 1935 wrote,
- Rest treatment should merely be a preliminary to the more important portion of therapy: the refitting of the individual for work and life. . . . Vocational rehabilitation, actual training for a trade, is a need of the chronically sick and permanently disabled . . . and [is] the single most important problem of medical statesmanship today.
He is buried in Forest Park Cemetery, Illinois, the cemetery where also are buried female anarchist and social reformer Voltairine De Cleyre, American Communist Party official Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, anarchist Emma Goldman, and baseball evangelist Billy Sunday.
