Do you know that tattooing children and babies was a very common practice in the 1950s and especially in some regions? Many babies and children have been tattooed over the years in the US states of Utah and Indiana. And these tattoos were not made to look pretty or cool, but in response to fears of nuclear war and the resulting radiation.
During the US-Korean war, most of the blood collected from volunteers was sent abroad, which created problems at home. Perhaps more importantly, Cold War tensions were reaching their peak and nuclear attacks seemed likely. In the event of such a nuclear attack, too much blood would be required for transfusions and the available resources could be rendered useless by radiation.
The US solution to this problem was to tattoo children’s blood types. So they could get the right blood type quickly or have them circulate like a “walking blood bank”. In an emergency, people would know which blood group they had just by looking at the tattoos so they could use it for onsite blood transfusions.
The idea was developed in 1950 by Dr. It was put forward by Theodore Curphey, but was dismissed because the cost, possible use of general donor blood is sufficient in such cases, and the error rate for detecting blood type is around 10 percent, historians Elizabeth K. Wolf and Anne E. Laumann say.
After a while, however, the Chicago Medical Civil Defense Committee approved that all residents’ blood types be tattooed. They were persuaded by their leader, Chicago doctor Andrew C. Ivy, who had probably seen Waffen-SS members have tattoos of their own blood type on their chests or upper arms during their role as American Medical Association adviser to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
Although these tattoos were not made in Chicago, they were decided to be made on the chest area as explosions could blow up arms and legs.
Residents of Lake County, Indiana, made progress in tattooing in 1951. Thousands of people got blood type tattoos before they decided to expand the program to schoolchildren. It was also tried in Utah, but the Mormon population opposed the decision on religious grounds, as tattoos are prohibited in the Bible. But the widely influential Mormon theologian Bruce R. McConkie managed to convince them that tattoos are allowed if “a blood type or identification number is placed in an inconspicuous place.”
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