vidiot: I wonder if this'll ever have a chance at coming back and biting them on the ass?
It might. Maybe someday the world will wake up and realize that blood management guidelines are being set by the same religion that promoted radioactive belts and Abrahm's electronic box.
The next part of the Seeber/Shander historical account of blood management addresses the legal problems that the JWs encountered when refusing blood:
Refusing blood transfusions on religious grounds was
not easy. Repeatedly, patients were physically forced to
take donor blood, using such high - handed methods as
incapacitation by court order, strapping patients to the
bed (even with the help of police officers), and secretly
adding sedatives to a patient’s infusion.
And that is the reason that is used as to why the JWs entered the realm of medical/scientific justification for their blood refusal - "refusing blood transfusions of religious grounds was not easy". No doubt it was not easy to convince the courts that child sacrifice was still considered to be a "religious" activity. What the authors have left out of this WT flavored account of 'persecution' is the hundreds and hundreds of court cases where the courts had to step in and save a child's life because the parent's believed in child sacrifice.
This next sentence identifies the very beginnings of the HLC (long before it was known as such):
In the early 1960s,
representatives of Jehovah ’ s Witnesses started visiting
physicians to explain the reasons why transfusions were
refused by the Witness population.
The authors then relate the development of the HLC - which I will return to - but for now, I want to skip to the part that keeps this in chronological order - the part that talks about Denton Cooley. That, too, was happening in the early 60s.
Denton Cooley was a world renowned heart surgeon - the first to do open heart surgery and the first to transplant an artificial heart. The authors have put Cooley's contribution after talking about events in the late 70s to make it appear like Cooley was responding to the JWs' efforts to 'educate' the medical profession:
Among the first to rise to the challenge was the heart
surgeon Denton Cooley of Texas. In the early 1960s, his
team devised methods to treat Witness patients. He
described the techniques in an article, “ Open heart
surgery in Jehovah ’ s Witnesses, ” published in 1964 in The
American Journal of Cardiology . In 1977, Cooley reported
his experiences with more than 500 patients [2] .
Cooley ’ s example was followed by many other courageous
physicians.
The impression that Seeber/Shander gives the reader is that Dr. Cooley devised his methods in order to treat JWs. That is not true.
Dr. Cooley devised a no blood prime method in order to treat everybody. The JWs just happened to be able to benefit from a procedure that was meant to be bloodless all along. Cooley devised a bloodless method in order to do open heart surgery on all his patients - he did not "rise to the challenge" put forth by a group with invented high risk factors. Dr. Cooley rose to the challenge of how to do open heart surgery on everyone - a procedure that needed the heart to be free of blood.
In his memoirs 1000,000 Hearts, Dr. Cooley describes his early efforts with using a blood prime to start the heart and lung machine in order to divert the blood away from the heart (pg 107):
For the earliest open heart operations using an elaborate system with a Gibbon console. blood infused with heparin was used to "prime" the system, as with any other pump. On the morning of surgery, blood had to be collected from ten or twelve donors of the same blood type. This greatly complicated the procedures. Often, even though we started to collect the blood before dawn, we didn't get enough matching units to start a procedure until the afternoon or evening. Although the red cells were cross-matched, the other blood components couldn't be tested. Once the individual units were mixed together, minor incompatibilities sometimes produced adverse reactions. This problem was originally described by Dr. Howard Gadboys and Dr. Robert Litwak, who believed that it could be solved by using a non-blood prime. They had used this method successfully in dogs.So Dr. Cooley started using a non blood primer in his open heart surgeries:
In 1961 my associate Dr. Atthur Beall and I began to perform dog experiments with a prime consisting of 5 percent dextrose in distilled water, and we were impressed with the results. We began to use this solution instead of blood to prime the pump for open heart operations in our patients. Before long, my team and I were doing eight or ten opeartions a day, whereas institutions that still used a blood prime did only one or two operations a week. By August 1962 we had operated on one hundred patients using this technique, which not only greatly facilitated open heart surgery but also eliminated blood-borne illnesses. Our simplified methods were a major advance. Within a year we'd done 241 cases using a non-blood prime. I believe that my popularizing this technique silenced the remaining critics of open heart surgery and led to the rapid acceleration in its growth. For this reason. I think it is one of my most important contributions. Although others, including Dr. Nazih Zuhdi and Dr, Allen Greer, had used a similar technique in a few cases, no one had pushed to make it an acceptable method.Dr. Cooley does not describe his motivation for using a no blood prime as "rising to the challenge" of operating on Jehovah's Witnesses in response to the JWs setting up visiting committees. That didn't happen. The JWs had nothing at all to do with Dr. Cooley's innovation. Nothing. But, they were able to take advantage of his brilliance:
The use of a bloodless prime also allowed me to pioneer open heart surgery on patients of the Jehovah's Witness faith. Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to receive blood transfusions or any other blood products because of their interpretation of several verses in the Bible. Refusal of blood places them at high risk for any surgical procedure in which serious blood loss could be an issue. Unless the operation is done quickly and precisely, the patient could bleed to death. Shortly after beginning to use a non-blood priming solution, I did the world's first open heart surgery on a Jehovah's Witness. That was in May 1962, and within a year I had done six more cases.* In no instance was blood given before, during, or after these operations. the fact that I could operate very quickly meant that less blood was lost, so my cases were more likely to be successful. For many years I was the only surgeon willing to operate on Jehovah's Witnesses.**This is the only place in Cooley's memoirs that he mentions the Jehovah's Witnesses. Cooley went on to perform 100,000 heart surgeries and the JWs only made up a small part of that monumental feat. Almost all of Cooley's open heart procedures were bloodless - it was the nature of the procedure itself - it had nothing to do with the JW blood refusal. Nothing. Cooley's methods were not a response to the JWs- they were a response to his profession. The JWs have used Cooley's innovations to promote their no blood ideology. They have tried to take credit for something that are not entitled to.
* My first seven Jehovah's Witness cases are described in detail in The American Journal of Cardiology, vol. 13 (1964), pp. 779-781.
** My team and I would eventually operate on more than 1,500 Jehovah's Witnesses
I have a little bit more to say about Dr. Cooley and the JWs' attempt to ride his coat tails but I need to take a break...
