Transfuser

To the bedside of one Mae Wahl, an anemic patient at the Greenpoint Hospital, L. I., a husky blood-seller was conducted, introduced, and told to roll up his sleeve. Through a hollow needle, a doctor then connected a tube with a vein in his arm. The tube led up to a barrel-shaped cylinder about an inch high from which on the other side a similar tube stretched to prick the chilly flesh of poor Mae Wahl. The doctor turned a switch and a plunger began to work in the cylinder. On the down stroke it sucked blood out of the veins of the seller; on the up stroke it pumped this same blood into the anemic lady. A metre on the side of the cylinder--much like the indicators on the ordinary red gasoline-pumps&151;registered plunger strokes, each transferring two cubic centimetres of blood.

The pump, the tubes, the indicator --all part of his new electric device for blood transfusion--were getting their first demonstration. The ordinary transfusion is complicated and requires the concentrated attention of several people. The new method is quicker, simpler, easier. In five minutes the seller, minus several gills of blood, was speeding away with his money in his pocket, and poor Mae Wahl was sitting up in bed. Soon she would have a patch of red in each meagre cheek.