I could be seen as having two vested interests in this story (being Czech and a doctor). But I will try not to exaggerate the importance of some brilliant Czech medical science.
Throughout history, people knew it was impossible to live without blood, but they knew nothing about its composition. Most of the discoveries about this vital fluid only emerged after the invention of good microscopes and medical procedures. Thus serology began as the scientific study of serum and other body fluids in c1900. In practice serology referred to the diagnostic identification of antibodies in the serum. Antibodies were typically formed in response to an infection, against other foreign proteins, or to one's own proteins as in auto-immune disease.
Dr Jansky was interested in if, and how mental disorders were triggered by blood disorders. He wanted to learn if the serum of psychotic patients, especially schizophrenics, differed in its coagulation characteristics from the one from the normal people. In a sample of 3,160 mentally ill patients that he examined, Dr Jansky demonstrated that human blood was divided into 4 basic types according to specific differences in the properties of red blood cells. With the blood coagulation, Jansky established in his original research the four basic blood groups that we now call A, B, O and AB!
Austrian biologist, physician and immunologist Karl Landsteiner (1868-1943) studied medicine at the University of Vienna. To specialise in chemistry he spent five years in the laboratories of Hantzsch at Zurich, Emil Fischer at Wurzburg and E. Bamberger at Munich. Back at home, Landsteiner resumed his medical studies at the Vienna General Hospital, and in 1896 he became an assistant under Max von Gruber in the Hygiene Institute at Vienna.
With his discovery it made possible to make the transfusions without the risk that the patient might die when receiving the blood of an inappropriate donor. Jan’s contribution thus saved many lives by insuring they got the right type of blood during a transfusion. Receiving an incompatible donor’s blood could have been terrible.
The different systems continued to create some danger in U.S medical practice. To resolve the issue, the American Association of Immunologists & Association of Pathologists & Bacteriologists made a joint recommendation in 1921 that the Jansky classification be adopted.
Janský was also a committed proponent of voluntary blood donations, campaigning for ordinary citizens to give. This humanitarian legacy lives on today, when people who donate blood regularly in the Czech Republic and Slovakia get a Jansky medal of honour. What a fitting way to honour his contribution to science!
In 1921, America’s Medical Commission acknowledged Janský's 4-group classification over Dr Landsteiner's who classified blood into only 3 groups. So I am still uncertain why Landsteiner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his blood type discovery in 1930!! One explanation was that Dr Jánský, as a specialist psychiatrist, did not further build on his research - he was still working as a neuropsychiatrist in a military hospital when he died in 1921. Meanwhile Dr Landsteiner dedicated his medical life to blood research.
Summary Dr Jansky was a Czech serologist, neurologist and psychiatrist. He was credited with the first classification of blood into the four types but never won a Nobel Prize or other world honour. Only decades later was the man slowly celebrated as the true discoverer of the 4 blood groups.
See the Czech film, The Secret of Blood (1953) .
Dr Joe