London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
Right.
I want you in a room at Guy’s Hospital.
September 1818.
And I want you to look at the blood.
Because that blood is about to do something blood has never done before.
It’s going to leave one human being.
And go into another.
Not sheep’s blood.
Not lamb’s blood.
Not calf’s blood.
Human blood.
And standing there, making this happen, is a 27-year-old London doctor.
His name is James Blundell.
Never heard of him?
No. Most people haven’t.
And there we go again.
Another important Londoner hiding in plain sight.
But then London is a happening place.
It all goes down here.
Or, in this case…
it goes in.
Human blood.
Into another human being.
Welcome to Guy’s Hospital.
September 1818.
And after today, Guy’s Hospital isn’t quite the same.
St Andrew’s, Holborn isn’t quite the same.
Piccadilly isn’t quite the same.
And, if I’ve done my job properly, Green Park Underground station isn’t quite the same either.
But we’ll get there.
First, back to the blood.
The date is usually given as September 25th, 1818. You’ll also find September 26th in the historical record.
Two hundred and eight years ago, give or take 24 hours.
And Blundell is attempting what is generally regarded as the first human-to-human blood transfusion.
Now, transfusion.
There’s our word for the day.
Transfusion.
It comes from Latin.
Trans, across.
Fundere, to pour.
To transfuse is, literally, to pour across.
And that’s exactly what Blundell was doing.
Pouring life across.
Or trying to.
Because blood transfusion wasn’t an entirely new idea.
People had been experimenting with it for a century and a half.
There’d been animal blood.
Lamb’s blood into human beings.
That sort of thing.
And, unsurprisingly, it hadn’t gone terribly well.
Blundell had been experimenting himself, and he’d reached one enormously important conclusion.
If you’re going to put blood into a human being, use human blood.
Which sounds so obvious to us that it’s almost comical.
Human blood for humans.
Well, yes.
But somebody had to establish it.
And there was something driving Blundell.
Women were dying.
He was an obstetrician. He had seen women haemorrhage after childbirth. He had watched their blood leave their bodies and watched life leave with it.
And you can almost hear the thought.
If what she has lost is blood, why can’t I put blood back?
That thought is the beginning of modern transfusion medicine.
And here’s the extraordinary thing.
Blundell was doing all this almost ninety years before doctors began matching donor blood with recipient blood.
He knew about the species problem.
Human blood for humans.
What he didn’t know, because nobody knew, was about the blood-group problem.
A.
B.
AB.
O.
None of that existed.
Karl Landsteiner wouldn’t identify the main human blood groups until 1900 and 1901.
More than eighty years in the future.
And practical blood matching and cross-matching came later still.
So Blundell knew that you couldn’t safely pour a sheep’s blood into a human being.
What he couldn’t possibly know was that you couldn’t safely pour just any human being’s blood into another human being either.
Think about that.
He’s working in the dark.
There’s a danger in that blood that he cannot see, cannot test for, cannot understand.
And yet he’s found the door.
He just doesn’t yet have all the keys.
Now, the patient at Guy’s that September day wasn’t, interestingly enough, a woman who had haemorrhaged in childbirth.
He was a man called Brazier.
He was desperately ill. There was an obstruction associated with cancer of the stomach. He was effectively starving to death.
Several men supplied blood.
Blundell collected it and, using syringes, introduced it into Brazier’s circulation.
Imagine the room.
No blood bags.
No refrigerated blood bank.
No neat little label saying O positive.
No cross-matching.
No modern transfusion set.
Just doctors.
Donors.
Apparatus.
A dying man.
And blood.
Human blood crossing into another human body.
Did it work?
For a while, something happened.
Brazier rallied.
But then he died, about two days later.
So be careful when you hear this called the first successful human-to-human blood transfusion.
It wasn’t.
Not in any sensible meaning of the word successful.
But that doesn’t diminish what happened in that room.
Quite the reverse.
Blundell had opened the door.
And he kept going.
Later transfusions were successful.
And the principle was established.
Human blood into human beings.
Now.
Who was this man?
Because this is where our story becomes very London.
James Blundell was born in London on December 27th, 1790.
And where was he baptised?
St Andrew’s, Holborn.
There’s our first London pin in the map.
Next time you’re passing that great church, stop for half a second.
James Blundell.
He’s there now.
Not literally, obviously.
But that’s what knowing London does.
It puts people into places.
He was educated first by the Reverend Thomas Thomason and then studied medicine at the United Borough Hospitals under his uncle, John Haighton, an important physiologist and obstetrician.
He went up to Edinburgh and qualified as a doctor in 1813.
And then?
Back to London.
Of course.
By 1814 he was lecturing on midwifery with his uncle. A little later he was lecturing on physiology.
And in 1818, the very year of that transfusion, he succeeded his uncle as lecturer in midwifery and physiology at Guy’s Hospital.
He became a big figure there.
Professor of obstetrics.
Lecturer on diseases of women.
And reputedly the man with the largest midwifery classes in London.
So there’s our second pin.
Guy’s Hospital.
Walk past Guy’s now and you know something.
Somewhere in that institution’s long history is this young London doctor asking one of those wonderfully simple questions that turn out not to be simple at all.
She’s dying because she’s losing blood.
Why can’t we put it back?
Blundell eventually left Guy’s after a falling-out with the hospital treasurer.
He built up a huge private practice.
And he became rich.
Very rich.
Estimates of his fortune ran from a third of a million to half a million pounds.
And, frankly, by the time we get to the older Blundell, I like him more and more.
He retired from full-time practice in 1847.
And his daily timetable became magnificent.
He didn’t get up until about noon.
There’s a man who has got life sorted out.
Up at noon.
Patients in the afternoon.
Dinner.
And then, at eight or nine o’clock at night, off he went on his rounds.
And this is where I want you to see him.
Because here comes my favourite James Blundell story.
It’s nighttime in London.
Piccadilly.
Gas lamps.
Horses.
Carriage wheels.
Clip-clop.
Clip-clop.
Carriages coming and going.
And their passenger compartments, for the most part, dark.
And then one comes along.
And there’s something odd about this carriage.
There’s a light glowing inside it.
People must have noticed it.
You would, wouldn’t you?
What’s that?
Who’s in there?
What on earth is he doing?
And in that little travelling pool of light sits Dr James Blundell.
Reading.
He always carried books with him on his rounds, and he had a light specially installed in his carriage so he could read as he travelled.
I love that.
He wasn’t going to waste the journey.
And what’s he reading?
Virgil.
We’re giving him Virgil.
And why not?
Blundell loved the classics.
He loved them so much that he published his own experiments in rendering four of Virgil’s pastorals into English hexameters.
So there he is.
The horses carrying him through nighttime London.
Gaslight outside.
That curious glow inside.
And Blundell, nose in Virgil.
Clip-clop.
Clip-clop.
Page turns.
London rolls past the window.
And eventually the illuminated carriage reaches home.
80 Piccadilly.
And this is where I want to bring London Walks into it.
Because we’ve got walks that start right there.
Come out of Green Park Underground station on the north side of Piccadilly and you’re practically on Blundell’s doorstep.
Our Oscar Wilde walk starts there.
Our Old Mayfair walk starts there.
And now our guides can stand there with their walkers and say, almost casually:
“As long as we’re here, I’d like you to make somebody’s acquaintance.”
James Blundell.
And then they can put that carriage back into Piccadilly.
There it goes.
Past us.
Light glowing inside.
Blundell reading Virgil.
On his way home.
And suddenly that patch of Piccadilly has changed.
That, for me, is one of the great pleasures of knowing London.
The buildings don’t move.
The streets don’t move.
But you do.
Because somebody tells you something.
Somebody introduces you to somebody.
And from then on you can’t quite see the place the way you saw it before.
St Andrew’s, Holborn.
James Blundell was baptised there.
Guy’s Hospital.
James Blundell pioneered human-to-human blood transfusion there.
Piccadilly.
James Blundell lived there.
And nighttime Piccadilly?
Well, keep your eyes open.
There’s a carriage coming.
There’s a light glowing inside it.
There’s a man reading Virgil.
That’s Dr Blundell.
And one final thing.
Yesterday’s Times.
September 24th, 2026.
The main story was about blood.
“Alarm over ‘forever chemicals’ in blood of Lancashire town residents.”
And when I saw it, I couldn’t help thinking of James Blundell.
September 1818.
September 2026.
Two hundred and eight years.
Blundell was putting human blood into another human being without even knowing that there were different human blood groups.
Today we can take a sample of blood and detect a man-made chemical in it measured in nanograms per millilitre.
Think about the distance we’ve travelled.
In 1818 the question was:
Can we put blood into another human being?
In 2026 we can interrogate blood.
Read it.
Ask it what’s got into us.
And there’s a phrase.
What’s got into us.
For James Blundell, that was quite literally the question.
Two hundred and eight years of learning what blood is, what it carries, what it can tell us.
And part of that extraordinary journey runs straight through Guy’s Hospital in London.
And through James Blundell.
Another Londoner we’d almost forgotten.
And now we haven’t.
Knowing the Londoners changes the way you see London.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
See you tomorrow.