Blood Trials: Transfusions, Injections, and Experiments in Africa, 1890-1920

From about 1880 to 1920, a culture of medical experimentation promoted blood transfusion as a therapy for severe anemia in Europe, which was applied in German East Africa in 1892 for a case of blackwater fever, a complication of malaria afflicting mainly Europeans. This first case of blood transfusion in Africa, in which an African's blood was transfused into a German official, complicates the dominant narrative that blood transfusions in Africa came only after World War I. Medical researchers moreover experimented with blood serum therapies on human and animal subjects in Europe and Africa, injecting blood of different species, "races" and ethnicities into others to demonstrate parasite transmissibility and to discover vaccines for diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, and yellow fever. While research in German colonies is highlighted here, this was a transnational medical culture that crossed borders and oceans. This research is of interest as a possible early pathway for the epidemic spread of HIV and other zoonoses in Africa and the world, which biomedical researchers have identified as emerging in West-Central Africa sometime around the turn of the twentieth century.