Elvira Dávila Ortiz
Founded First Blood Blank in Colombia
Thank you to Daniel Suarez Baquero, a fellow Colombian nurse PhD, who let us know about this remarkable nurse and assisted with the translation and cultural context to accurately share her story.
Elvira Dávila Ortiz was born in Colombia in 1917. Starting at age ten, she attended three boarding schools across Europe before returning to Bogotá, Colombia in 1930. While abroad she became fluent in both English and French, in addition to her native language of Spanish. At age 15 she attended the High School in the Colegio de la Presentación — San Façon, and implored for permission to study nursing from her family. Gaining their approval, she graduated nursing school in 1934 from the Centro de Acción Social Infantil, which was run by two Colombian nurses who had gained nursing education in Paris.
During her work as a pediatric nurse at the Hospital de La Misericordia in Bogotá, she observed severely ill newborns with blood conditions such as anemia or tropical diseases, but blood transfusions during this time were still nascent and considered high risk for civilians, despite having been used in World War I. Having learned of successful person-to-person blood transfusion and blood storage from her time in Europe, new advances in blood preservation by the 1930s meant that blood could be kept viable for transfusion outside the body for at least a few hours. The first reported “Blood Bank” concept was established in Chicago in 1937 and published in the Journal of the American Medical Journal in 1938. Seeking more successful treatment options for the newborns in her care, she decided to complete her baccalaureate university degree — a rare career trajectory for nurses who were educated in hospital-based programs at that time.
“The day I don’t learn something new, that day is not worth it” — Elvira Dávila Ortiz
Elvira Dávila graduated with a comprehensive thesis on blood transfusion in 1943. Her research found that while transfusions held the real potential to improve the health of newborns with anemia or other diseases, the public perception of donating blood was one of fear, or seen as a risk to their own lives. With promising research results, she expanded her work to Hospital San Juan de Dios in Bogotá (one of the oldest hospitals in Latin America, dating to the 1500s and where research on the first synthetic vaccine against malaria was conducted), as she became the only trained nurse in Colombia to carry out transfusion procedures. A member of her thesis jury, Dr. Jorge Cavelier Gaviria, then President of the Colombian Red Cross (La Cruz Roja) invited Elvira Dávila to create the country’s first Blood Bank.
Of the difficulties Elvira Dávila faced, the absence of voluntary blood donors was chief among them. She began by asking friends and acquaintances to collaborate, and ultimately offered payment of five cents per donated cubic centimeter to those who agreed to donate blood.
“I earned the nickname of the vampire,” joked Dávila, who at the time performed a blood test on the donor to make sure he or she did not have syphilis, which was “the AIDS of the time.”
After making the first operational Blood Bank in Latin America and having the advantage of being tri-lingual, Elvira Dávila Ortiz decided to travel to New York in 1944 at the recommendation of the International Council of Nurses. There she worked in the cancer ward of Memorial Hospital (now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), as they had few nurses at the time, and also did a specialization in surgery and postoperative at New York Presbyterian Hospital, a university hospital of the Weill Medical College of Cornell and the Medical College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia.
Returning to Colombia, Dr. Cavelier asked her to implement and manage six new surgery rooms at the Hospital de la Samaritana, as well as direct six floors of the hospital. During this time she found that the nuns and early trained nurses lacked the necessary knowledge to take on the tasks of maintaining and transfusing blood products and how to support surgeons with sterile technique in the operating rooms. Dr. Cavelier proposed her to direct what would become one of the oldest university-based nursing schools in Colombia, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, which still trains and graduates nurses today. She later became Director of Nursing at the Monserrat Psychiatric Clinic and the San Ignacio Hospital. She married in 1946, had four children, and died in 2008, at the age of 91.
Sources
We sourced the above information from Enfermeria TV, Al Dia, Human Technopole, Wikipedia, EJE21, Mujeres con Ciencia, and Cruz Roja Colombiana.
Additional information, published in 2019, is covered in Spanish in the book Enfermeras con Historia by Diego Molina Ruiz.
Please submit any additional sources or information to us to add via social media or email us at nursesyoushouldknow@gmail.com.
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