Luis Agote and His Contribution to the Universal Science

Abstract

The three great problems of surgery until the mid-nineteenth century were pain, deaths caused by infections, and hemorrhagic shock. The use of anesthetics drugs ended the intraoperative pain. Years later, antisepsis and asepsis were introduced, thanks to which surgeries did not ended in serious infectious conditions. However, deaths caused by hemorrhagic shock continued over the following years. The possibility of replacing the lost blood was still a problem without solution, for which different methods had been used, but all of them failed. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the discovery of the blood types enabled the first attempts of transfusion with certain safety; however, blood coagulated preventing the expected good result of the procedure from being reached. In 1914 Luis Agote, Argentine physician, researcher and politician, discovered the citrate method, making blood incoagulable; with the beginning of the First World War he performed the first transfusion, and this procedure then saved lives transfusing the wounded on the battlefields. Agote decided not to patent his discovery, since he was convinced that it belonged to the whole humanity