Chapter 85

After watching his two somewhat dejected friends leave, John stood at the door for a few seconds, then smiled slightly, turned around, and went back inside.

He didn’t go up to the laboratory on the second floor.

Today, he had originally planned to ask all the friends who came to his house for help, but after seeing their reactions to his future studies with Bergmann, he wisely abandoned this idea and only invited his two best friends. Having lived for so many years in two lifetimes, he had a good understanding of human nature and immediately realized that he had become the focus of envy and even jealousy. If he announced that he was starting his own research project, he might receive a lot of public support, but privately...

Well, most people probably wouldn’t feel too comfortable. Some might think John was overestimating himself, while others might feel psychologically unbalanced. In short, it would be a loss.

Human nature can be that complicated.

The current situation is that John is their peer, but he performs better, which can easily make others envious or不服气 (unwilling to accept it). However, if John achieves fame and his reputation and status far exceed those of his classmates, their relationship might not be as close as it is now, but the aforementioned situation would no longer exist.

"Still, I'll leave it to Hans to find some homeless people or poor people to conduct the experiments."

Back inside, sitting on the sofa, John thought with a sense of helplessness. Although he was somewhat reluctant to do this from a psychological standpoint, given the current situation, he had no choice but to make this decision...

...

If his future colleagues or anyone related to medicine had seen what happened in the laboratory just now, they would probably have immediately guessed what John was researching and why he needed so many subjects.

That’s right, it’s the ABO blood group system, which even ordinary people in the future know about!

Because he thought of improving the sphygmomanometer, John realized he could conduct some research on blood. After considering many aspects, he ultimately focused on the study of the blood group system.

What is a blood group?

If you ask this question to an ordinary person in the future, they might give you an answer, precise or vague, but basically everyone knows that different people have different blood types, and incompatible blood types can cause agglutination or hemolysis, so people with different blood types cannot receive blood transfusions from each other. Moreover, everyone generally knows that blood types are hereditary; two people with type A blood will not have a child with type B blood, or else there would be a fight at home...

In the 21st century, this is common knowledge.

But in this era, people had no knowledge of blood types, even the top surgeons and blood experts in all of Europe had no concept of it. Although direct blood transfusion techniques had already appeared decades ago, doctors were indifferent to the countless patients who died during transfusions. After all, the chances of a blind cat catching a dead mouse during a transfusion were still quite high, and more people died before that!

Therefore, when John described the three major challenges in surgery to Bergmann, he had already thought of this.

In terms of physiological research on blood, John had many areas he could explore. For example, the functions of blood, which people had studied but only superficially; the buffering function and homeostasis theory of blood, which Bérnard had proposed the concept of the internal environment over twenty years ago, and the perfection of the buffering and homeostasis theory was a 20th-century achievement; and the concepts of the defensive and protective functions of blood, which were in the embryonic stage of immunology at the time, were too early to propose and difficult to achieve with 19th-century research methods.

After much consideration, John quickly focused on the blood group system, ultimately choosing the simplest and first-discovered ABO blood group system!

The reasons were simple: on one hand, the proposal of the ABO blood group system was not too far in the future; Landsteiner would discover this hidden secret in the human body in 1902. On the other hand, the ABO blood group system is of great significance to the development of surgery—clarifying that preoperative blood type matching is necessary for transfusions would greatly reduce mortality rates, and surgeons would have an effective and relatively safe way to deal with surgeries with excessive blood loss!

As for the other reason, the fact that the inventor of the ABO blood group system would win the Nobel Prize decades later, John didn’t care at all; there was still over a century of medical knowledge waiting in line...

In short, for John, who was going to study with Bergmann, this research direction was just right.

The only thing that troubled John was that, although proving the existence of the ABO blood group system might not require highly sophisticated equipment or instruments, and the experimental design was not complex, he could do it alone, the entire process was quite tedious, and to have sufficient persuasiveness, he needed to find enough subjects for cross-matching!

In other words, he needed enough people!

That’s why he thought of his classmates and friends at the University of Berlin; a sample size of forty people would be sufficient for John to deduce the blood type theory.

However, the scene at the gathering today made John abandon this idea, and he decided to have Hans find some homeless people and poor people, paying them to help. For these people, a small income would be enough to make them contribute some blood, and John wouldn’t mistreat them. He would definitely pay them more within his means and prepare thorough disinfection measures to avoid unnecessary tragedies.

Therefore, it would be very convenient to invite them.

Moreover, John knew that in 1884, Europe was much easier to find human subjects for experiments than in the future.

In the 19th century, European doctors were angels of salvation on one hand and executioners on the other. When conducting research in areas of interest, they rarely considered the lives of patients, especially those poor people with low social status, who could become the best experimental subjects without any approval! In London, considered the capital of the civilized world, countless orphans frequently encountered such situations and received no criticism, as even the general public believed that if they could serve as experimental subjects for doctors, it would be an effective return to society!

This was the prevailing thought in the Western world at the time.

And don’t think this was only a 19th-century phenomenon. Even in the 1930s and post-war, the U.S. Public Health Service would unhesitatingly infect hundreds of black people with syphilis to observe the disease, only apologizing as they approached the 21st century...

Because the laboratory was set up at home, and he decided not to ask those friends for help, the number of people John needed for the experiment could be large or small, and there was no need for forty. He had invited Pick and Luther upstairs just to let them spread the word quietly, so others would know he was indeed working on this experiment. As for how many people he would invite for the actual experiment, he just needed to make it look like he was doing it.

This wasn’t laziness or intentional falsification.

Given his precise knowledge of the ABO blood group system theory from the future, John had no need to really complete so many experiments, and it was necessary to fabricate some data to avoid unexpected results with the current experimental equipment and conditions...