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CITY LIFE
Chicago: birthplace of house music, deepdish pizza—and blood banks?
Dr. Bernard Fantus created a new standard in Cook County in the 1930s.
By DILPREET RAJU
Ch icago is home to deep-dish pizza, the first Ferris wheel, house music, and, to the surprise of many, the world’s first-ever full-scale blood bank.
Medicine took a massive leap forward on March 15, 1937, as Dr. Bernard Fantus opened the first official blood bank with regulated procedures for obtaining, storing, and using blood at Cook County Hospital, now known as the Cook County Health and Hospitals System.
“We couldn’t do half the things we do today, in terms of surgery,” without the invention of the blood bank, said Dr. Claudia Fegan, Cook County Health chief medical o cer since 2013.
“We couldn’t treat cancer patients if we didn’t have a blood bank,” Fegan continued. Chemotherapies “can be toxic to the bone marrow and then the patients need to be supported while their bone marrow recovers.”
It’s called a blood bank as various quantities of blood are “deposited” and “withdrawn” as needed, with a balance sheet to match.
Fegan noted that advancements in the nearly 90-year history of institutional blood banking now allow for blood banks to test for multiple contaminants and separate one blood donation into packaged blood, plasma, and platelets.
“When most people think about transfusions, they’re thinking about packed red cells, but after you give so many units of packed red cells, you also have to give some of the other things—platelets to help with clotting and plasma as well,” Fegan said. “We use it for di erent purposes depending on the needs of the patient.”
Through use of centrifuges, medical technicians are “able to spin the blood and separate it based on the weight, separating components, and really, out of one unit of blood, you can serve multiple patients,” she said.
Fegan said Cook County Health utilizes more than 10,000 units of blood per year.
After a few months of operating Cook County Hospital’s blood bank, Fantus wrote a groundbreaking article in the Journal of the American Medical Association documenting the procedures and demonstrating the value of refrigerated blood within the medical setting.
Alan Ho stadter worked as a certified blood banker for over 35 years in Chicago before retiring in 2009. He worked at the original Cook County Hospital, fondly called “County” by Ho stadter and medical sta ers. One day in the 1970s, he found a plaque commemorating Fantus hanging inside the hospital.
“It had tarnished considerably. I had never heard of Dr. Bernard Fantus. I did not know that the term ‘blood bank’ came from his concept, and it was then that I started trying to find out a little bit more about him,” Ho stadter said. It was around then that Ho stadter was found by Muriel Fantus Fulton, niece of Bernard Fantus.
“I dug deeper into it, simply because she pushed me. She said, ‘You have got to keep pushing it. Nobody seems to know, everybody’s forgotten my uncle was a famous guy,’” he said.
“[Fantus] looked at the work that preceded him and decided that [blood banking] should be codified,” Ho stadter said. “And that it should be organized so that people weren’t practicing medicine in an aberrant way from one hospital or medical setting to another.”
One doctor who utilized the advancements created by Bernard Fantus for decades is trauma surgeon Dr. Richard Fantus, Bernard’s great-nephew. Until becoming the Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center department of surgery chairman in 2019, Dr. Richard Fantus worked tirelessly in operating rooms, with routine 40-hour shifts, and “was a big consumer of blood from the blood bank over the years.”
From a young age, Fantus knew his great-uncle was an important figure. “One might say medicine is in my blood,” Fantus said. “He was my inspiration.”
Nearly 20 years after Bernard’s death in 1940, the Fantus Clinic, an outpatient center, opened as an arm of Cook County Hospital. Richard Fantus and his family were in attendance when it was torn down in 2018 and paved into a parking lot for the Cook County Health Professional Building.
“Back when I was four years old, I was at the dedication of the Fantus Clinic,” he said, “I still do remember posing there with my little red bow tie.”
Richard Fantus said a major milestone from his career was being a part of the hospital’s transfusion safety committee, “where we went and used evidence to reduce transfusions, and, over the years, thousands of lives have been saved due to reducing the number of transfusions.”
“People think it’s like a medicine IV fluid, but it actually comes out from a patient, so nothing is without complication,” Fantus said. If hospitals can reduce the number of transfusions or the amount of blood transfused, they can decrease patient complications, he said. His immediate family is heavily involved in medicine, too, as his sons decided to become doctors. Richard “Jake” Fantus is an assistant professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center, and Robert “Josh” Fantus works as a corneal surgeon at NorthShore Health System. Dr. Fantus stresses he never pushed his sons toward medical school.
“They both have traits that stem back to Uncle Bernard. They’re dedicated to patient care. They’re in it for the right reason. It’s not a business; it’s a profession,” Fantus said. “It’s hard for them—for all of us—as medicine has become [such] a monetized industry and some of the humanistic qualities tend to get lost when we’re looking at things other than just patient outcomes.”
“Fortunately, they both practice in an oldschool way; they talk to the patients. It’s an important part of what they do, so I’m proud,” Fantus said.
Though anyone can receive the benefits of blood donation and blood banking, donation has long been an exclusionary process for gay men and men who have sex with men. In 2015, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed the lifetime ban in lieu of a one-year deferral, which the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) criticized.
“Human Rights Campaign believes that the updated policy, like its precursors, does not treat persons with like risks in a similar way,” its webpage on blood donations reads.
“HRC has strongly encouraged FDA to revise the donor questionnaire based on an individual risk assessment of sexual behaviors upon which all donors are evaluated equally, without regard to sexual orientation or gender identity.”
When going to donate blood, potential donors must first go through a risk-assessment questionnaire about the donor’s personal history. That questionnaire asks if potential donors have engaged in anal sex, received short-acting PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), or gotten a tattoo from a non-state-regulated entity within three months of a donation date. Those who answer “yes” to any of those questions are automatically deferred, meaning they must wait to give blood. In January, the FDA issued draft guidance that recommends changes to the donor history questionnaire that would remove gender identity from questions and reduce deferral periods to three months from the current length of one year.
It is currently unclear whether these drafted changes, which have yet to be finalized and implemented, will have an impact on donor eligibility and participation rates.
Hoffstadter volunteers at Rush University College of Health Sciences as an assistant clinical instructor for the master’s program in medical laboratory science and at local blood donation centers.
“Every time I go to a bloodmobile and serve juice and cookies,” Hoffstadter said, “one of the things I do is [tell people], ‘Hey, did you know that blood banking got started in Chicago in the late 1930s? Have you ever heard of Dr. Bernard Fantus?’ That’s my schtick. That’s what I do when I’m serving juice and cookies.”
@dilpreetraju