Of course, it’s not about minor injuries. Unexpected blood loss during major surgeries and especially during war. What if we lived in those times, how could we deal with this problem?

Now let’s see what methods 16th and 17th century physicians discovered in order to prevent blood loss.

As we all know, maintaining the blood circulation in our body is one of the most important points that connect us to life.

If the body loses even about 20% of its blood, a hemorrhagic shock occurs in the body and the heart’s performance slows down considerably. In addition, body temperature is greatly reduced and blood pressure tends to drop. In addition, if the body loses 40% or even more of the blood it has, all the organs begin to stop gradually and the person gradually goes to death.

At this point, blood loss has always been a very important problem in human history.

In the past, healers and now doctors have many ways to prevent and stop blood loss. We have a great command of today’s treatment methods, but what was the solution for physicians in the past?

In fact, some of the interventions used today to stop blood loss are based on techniques that were discovered in the past. The vast majority of these methods were discovered accidentally many years ago in order to treat the wounded in wars.

The first of these techniques: Ligation.

During the war, the soldiers whose limbs were damaged were subjected to amputation (cutting out an organ that was deemed impossible to heal), so blood loss was also experienced a lot. During the amputation, cauterization with boiling oil was used to prevent this.

Although boiling oil could not be supplied during blood loss, a mixture of turpentine, rose oil and egg yolk, which is known to prevent infection, was prepared. Of course, these traditional methods of treatment were quite painful for the soldiers, and therefore a method called ligation was thought to be less painless.

In the ligation process applied to reduce blood loss, a piece of thread or wire called a suture was tied around the blood vessels. This method was also used by important physicians of history such as Galen and Hippocrates.

But the ligation process also had some downsides. For example, threads were sometimes able to infect wounds, and for this reason, ligation is not among today’s treatment methods.

In the past, we must have heard that wounds are cauterized to prevent blood loss.

With this method, a metal object was heated in a fire to cauterize the wound, and it was applied to the wound to repair the damaged blood vessels and clot the blood. This method, used by many cultures around the world, was also very painful and the resulting burn would have caused much more tissue damage in already damaged body parts.

This application, which is also called cauterization, was used quite often on the battlefields because it was practical. Although this method reduces the risk of infection as well as preventing blood loss, it is not used by doctors now.

Another method is “Tourniquet application”.

A tourniquet was a material or device that was fixed to a part of the area to limit the flow of blood throughout the body’s limb. However, while the tourniquet procedure provided a temporary solution at the point of blood flow, the ligation procedure promised much more permanence.

A doctor at the time suggested that for the procedure to be more effective, the limb should be placed in a higher position and the treatment administered that way. Yet another physician of the 16th century developed a tool called a pneumatic tourniquet. With this tourniquet, a cylindrical bag was inflated and the underlying blood vessels were compressed.

It was also very practical to apply the pneumatic tourniquet to the person suffering from blood loss, and it also prevented the nerve palsy that occurs when the blood vessels are left without blood for a long time. Contrary to the treatment methods we have discussed so far, the tourniquet procedure is still used today to prevent blood loss.

Blood transfusion at last!

Although the physicians of the 16th century developed many methods to prevent blood loss, sometimes they could not reach their goals completely due to wrong practices. Thus, it came to mind to renew the blood loss that occurred in humans with animal or human blood, and trials were started.

Unfortunately, this process ended in failures to a large extent. Fortunately, when the dates showed 1901, a physician discovered that two people had to have the same blood groups in order to give blood to each other, and safe blood transfusions began to be performed.

Of course, it took time to develop this technique and put it on solid foundations, and this method was used in World War II. It was not used until World War II. Afterwards, this procedure was accepted by the whole medical world and the problem of blood loss became history.