History: Blood Transfusions In Canada

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History has played a significant role in our daily lives and how through the unpleasant wars that bring death, one would take for granted the good can come out of it. The advancements in technology for WW1 was worth all the lives lost by the brave canadian soldiers which, in turn, was the reason for advances in technologies people use to this day and has impacted Canada significantly. Within the list of several inventions, one of the biggest ones that impacted our society is blood transfusions, which has saved many lives in Canada. Along with this, Canada was introduced with portable x-rays which provided medics a better way to help save people who have been harmed or injured whether in battle in WWI or in a car crash in the present day.
Finally, a more or less known technology in the 21st century is synthetic fertilizer which was developed by Fritz Haber, who also assisted the development of poison gas for war, which in many ways helps save lives of canadian people through a large scale food production that can sustain the world’s needs. Within this essay, it will be discussed how the canadians soldiers who lost their lives did not die in vain and aided the future in a way the did not plan on.

Now the first invention that had one of the greatest impacts in canadian history is blood transfusions.
During the first world war, blood transfusions were developed to help save lives of soldiers through the process of taking blood from a donor and relocating it into a soldier, sometimes for several different reasons, but mostly for when there was extreme amounts of blood lost. Found in the book, Blood Transfusions, it is said, a transfusion, in addition to replacing some of the blood that has been lost, tends to improve the patient's resistance to microorganisms, and to shorten the coagulation time of the blood. Recurrence of the haemorrhage is therefore discouraged on the whole, and in many cases a series of transfusions for recurrent haemorrhages has saved a patient's life when the prognosis had seemed to be almost hopeless. (Keynes
41)

This quote reveals the nature of how blood transfusions would save one’s life, for as explained, it would reduce the chances of a hemorrhage, which often refers to severe blood loss.
It would save the life of a soldier by reducing the time it takes for blood to clot, therefore stopping the flow of blood that would leave the soldier’s body. Now while this helped save lives during WW1, it continued to affect us to this day. Blood transfusions were not only useful for WW1, but all the way to the present, saving even more people through more efficient and better practices. According to government statistics, “around 4.5 million americans alone would die each year without life saving blood transfusions”. This statistic helps show how blood transfusions, which was originally developed only in the thought that it would be used in the war, helped save lives afterhand. It reveals how the advancements of technology were created through the tragedies of brave canadian soldiers in WW1. With the comprehension of how a blood transfusion, an advancement in technology, was inspired due to the lost of soldiers in the battlefield and aided the lives of the present, it can help one understand how this technology impacted
Canada.

After an in-depth discussion on blood transfusions, it is time to shed light on how the creation of portable x-rays changed how the war worked and how medics were given the upperhand in dire situations. The realization of how practical the portable x-ray was in the war is described by Scientific American, “Their usefulness was also quickly recognized by military surgeons: suddenly it became easy to find broken bones, bullets and chunks of shrapnel in wounded soldiers”. While x-rays were useful before they became portable, Marie Curie, began and developed a mobile x-ray, which was nicknamed little Curies. Little Curies became important to war because instead of having to bring soldiers to a centre with an x-ray the x-rays can be brought to them. This ease of access significantly reduced the time to get a soldier to a medical centre therefore increasing their chances of survival. This was major to Canada through a medical innovation changing our methods today that led to the rescue of more lives of canadian soldiers in the past in present that probably couldn’t be there due to the need for it in war. Now another way this technology has impacted us is through another instance of women being proved

Finally, the last invention, synthetic fertilizer, was invented right before the war in order to find a new method of helping sustain enough food to feed soldiers and people, but the same process to make this fertilizer was then used with nitric acid to create gunpowder and ammunition. In the article posted by the globalist, it was expressed, “650,000 people were killed or horribly maimed in World War I, mainly on the Western Front, through the use of poison gas warfare. And Haber was the driving force, visionary genius and chief experimenter who made it all possible. He even personally supervised the very first poison gas attack in history against British troops at Ypres on April 22, 1915.”