Since the Red Cross began to bank blood, thousands of gallons of red blood corpuscles have been thrown down the drainonly the blood plasma is used. Dr. Warren Cooksey, technical supervisor of Detroit's blood bank, thought there ought to be something these discarded red cells, which constitute 46% of the whole blood, would be good for. Last winter he began supplying Detroit hospitals with batches of specially processed red corpuscles for experimental transfusions (TIME, Feb. 15). Last week Philadelphia Naval Hospital doctors, who had the same idea, reported that red-cell transfusions had proved spectacularly successful in treating anemia.
The Navy doctors administered...