'In the Blood' Review: How to Improve a First-Aid Kit
In March 2000, at a Rand Corp. conference session on the medical support of urban military operations, John Holcomb ruefully acknowledged that the tools for controlling bleeding in battle had not advanced much since the Trojan War. Gauze and pressure—that was it. An Army trauma surgeon, Dr. Holcomb had served on the ill-fated mission in Mogadishu in October 1993, when 18 Army Rangers died, many from excessive blood loss.
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Yet the most effective product—and the one that is now carried in the first-aid kit by every member of the American military—was discovered and commercialized by two unknown middle-aged men working at a nondescript gas-equipment company in New England. “In the Blood,” by Charles Barber, a writer in residence at Wesleyan University, tells the captivating, often cinematic story of how a medical innovation was improbably developed, fiercely resisted (by Dr. Holcomb, among others) and ultimately adopted.
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Mr. Hursey was “fascinated” by zeolite, which is composed of tiny caverns “in a series of endlessly repeating honeycomb patterns” that capture small molecules. Zeolite can help to separate nitrogen from oxygen since oxygen molecules pass through it more easily. In 1983, as Mr. Hursey was thinking about those caverns, he found himself wondering if ground-up zeolite could treat an open wound by absorbing the liquid component of blood while leaving in place the components for clotting. After an encouraging experiment on a pet-store mouse, he collaborated with a local surgeon to conduct further studies on pigs. “The zeolite stopped the pigs’ bleeding every time, in a matter of seconds,” Mr. Barber writes. “It was miraculous.”
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Then, in 2003, Messrs. Hursey and Gullong learned of a competition in which bleeding-control products would be evaluated. They ground up some zeolite, vacuum-sealed it with a food-storage device they picked up at Target, and sent it off to the competition. The product—which they called “QuikClot”—would outperform all comers, including the shrimp-based product that Dr. Holcomb and the Army had been developing.
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