Frederic Duran i Jordà

Who is Frederic Duran i Jordà

Doctor Frederic Duran i Jordà (1905-1957) has been one of the most outstanding and yet unknown characters in the history of Catalan medicine. Duran i Jordà created the world's first blood bank during the Spanish Civil War and devised a new method for making indirect blood transfusion. With the Duran method it was possible to preserve the blood and transport it to the battle front, specifically to the Aragon front and, thus, to save the lives of many soldiers.

Creator of the first blood bank

He managed to create by enabling the first mobile unit to transport blood from the world, a refrigerated fish truck, adapted for your needs.

A pioneering challenge that collected techniques and protocols developed by him and his team that led transfusion in the global context of the time.

Frederic Duran i Jordà was a pioneer in the field of hemotherapy, since he created for the first time in history a transfusion service in the modern sense of the term, a trajectory torn by an exile that he undertook with Dr. Josep Trueta. He settled in England, where he no longer returned and where paradoxically, he worked as a pathologist, a field in which he also excelled in researching stomach ulcers and digestive diseases.

Path silenced

However, his career was completely silenced until the late 1980s, but it was not until 1997 that he began to recognize the magnitude of his figure with the biography written by Dr. Joan Grífols i Espés.

The headquarters of the Banc de Sang i Teixits in the Poblenou district is the Frederic Duran i Jordà building (1905-1957) in homage to the one who pioneered the creation of a blood bank as we know it today. The first blood bank was located in Montjuïc, in the current Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia, and was known as the hospital nº. 18, around 1937. Frederic Duran and his team were pioneers in calling on the population to donate blood. The first big call was made through the radio and in 18 months, 30,000 Barcelonans were mobilized.