Saving

Quantities of human blood are lost each year in childbirth. Much of it is blood which obstetricians leave in the placenta by clamping umbilical cords, doing so in the belief that they thereby make the afterbirth easy and complete. This practice "never had any scientific appeal" to Obstetrician James Robert Goodall of Montreal. "Why waste all this valuable material?" he asked. He and his assistants* experimented, found no harm done to mothers by draining placental blood immediately upon birth, found--as he announced in this month's Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics--that it can be stored indefinitely and that it is "a safe, constant, efficient and lucrative source of blood for transfusions." Estimating the recovery of four ounces of blood per delivery, the total saving of blood in U. S. childbirths would aggregate some 60,000 gal. per year.

* Drs. Francis Oscar Anderson, Gerald Thomas Altimas, Franklin Lane MacPhail.

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