Medicine: Unsung Hero

In war and peace, oceans of blood have been drawn from healthy volunteer donors and transfused into the veins of surgery patients and victims of a wide variety of diseases and injuries. The substance that keeps the stored blood from clotting and makes it usable in transfusions is sodium citrate. The man who perfected the citration process back in 1915 is still active, though probably not one in a hundred of the millions who owe their lives to his transfusion method could name him. Unaccountably, he has never received a Nobel Prize.

Last week in Atlantic City, the American College of Surgeons belatedly bestowed its highest academic honor, an honorary fellowship, on Transfusion Pioneer Richard Lewisohn, 84. Born and educated in Germany, Dr. Lewisohn came to the U.S. in 1907, and within a year joined the surgical staff of Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital. He has been there ever since. Besides his historic work on citration, Dr. Lewisohn introduced more drastic (and proportionately more effective) operations for stomach ulcers, and pioneered in using the first crude preparations of folic-acid antagonists against cancer. Though technically retired, Dr. Lewisohn follows closely the war on cancer, still visits Mount Sinai’s Cell Research Laboratory almost every day.