Bernard Fantus

Bernard Fantus was a Hungarian JewishAmerican physician. He established the first hospital blood bank in the United States in 1937 at Cook County Hospital, Chicago while he served there as director of the pharmacology and therapeutics department.

Fantus was born in Budapest, Hungary . He gained his MD degree in 1899 from the University of Illinois. From 1934, he was the director of therapeutics at Cook County Hospital. The science and practice of blood transfusions was developing internationally at the time. Smallscale refrigerated storage of whole blood had been used first in World War I and this had been developed in Russia into a largerscale system of blood depots. In the US, hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic certainly used refrigerated storage of blood from 1935. Fantus conducted further experiments in blood storage, culminating in the preservation of blood for up to ten days, and he prepared to establish a Blood Preservation Laboratory at the hospital. Crucially, however, he changed its name before launch to Cook County Hospital Blood Bank. It opened in March 1937.

Source: Wikipedia