During the early 1960s, American heart surgeon Denton Cooley successfully performed numerous bloodless open-heart surgeries on Jehovah’s Witnesspatients. Fifteen years later, he and his associate published a report of more than 500 cardiac surgeries in this population, documenting that cardiac surgery could be safely performed without blood transfusion.^[10]

Ron Lapin (1941–1995) was an American surgeon, who became interested in bloodless surgery in the mid-1970s. He was known as a “bloodless surgeon” due to his willingness to perform surgeries on severely anemic Jehovah’s Witness patients without the use of blood transfusions.

Patricia A. Ford (1955–) was the first surgeon to perform a bloodless bone marrow transplant.^[11]

In 1998, Professor James Isbister, a haematologist from Australia, first proposed a paradigm shift back to a patient focus. In 2005, he penned an article in the journal, ‘Updates in Blood Conservation and Transfusion alternatives’. In this article Prof. Isbister coined the term ‘patient blood management’, noting that the focus should be changed from the product to the patient.