Blood - from Myth to Reality

Human imagination, driven by passion, ascribes astonishing properties to blood: women are excluded, patients undergo harmful treatments, abuses occur, and a certain carelessness leads to the greatest public health disaster. Hematology, the science of blood, has achieved successes: the conquest of a devastating form of leukemia, the organization of a mobile transfusion unit, community-based control of a hereditary anemia, the discovery of a unique form of myelodysplasia—5q- syndrome—and the prevention of hemolytic anemia in newborns, which was once the cause of family tragedies.