Another small item in the great annals of medical history; today is the 338th anniversary of one of the earliest experiments in blood transfusion. If you’ve ever taken an English lit class, you undoubtedly read the diary of Samuel Pepys, who recorded his every day life in great detail. He wrote about love, sex, history, death, destruction–all of those tiny details of life in 17th century London, including the great fire of 1666 that nearly destroyed the entire city.

On November 14, 1666, Pepys wrote that Richard Lower of the Royal Society performed the first direct blood transfusion from the artery of one dog to the vein of another, using quills for the tubings. How’s that for sterile procedure?

The first succesful human transfusion was in 1818, when British obstetrician James Blundell transfused human blood into a woman suffering from postpartum hemorrhage. She survived both the transfusion and the hmorrhage, rather miraculously.