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accumulate blood-group records from very large numbers of soldiers, each of whom was routinely
tested in anticipation of being called either to give blood as a donor or to receive it as a casualty.
Hanka Herschfeld, from the Royal Serbian Army, was the medical officer in charge of the
Allied blood bank on the Balkan Front. Her husband, Ludwig, had been one of the scientists who,
before the war, had helped to work out the way the different blood groups were inherited. With this
background it is no surprise that they became curious about the accumulating results from the blood
bank. The Allies drew their troops from all over the world and the Herschfelds noticed that the
frequencies of the blood groups in the soldiers of different nationalities were often quite different
from one another. Certainly they were still all either A, B, AB or O, but the proportions of each
were different depending on where they were from. For example, far more Indian Army soldiers
belonged to blood group B than did Europeans, who were, symmetrically, higher in the proportion
of group A.
The Herschfelds interpreted these differences in blood-group frequencies as having something
to do with the distant origins of these different nationalities – and they were right. But in their now
famous paper published in the leading medical journal the Lancet, just after the war, they went too
far and divided the world into two separate races. Race A came from northern Europe, while Race
B began in India. The varying blood-group proportions seen in the soldiers of different
nationalities were explained by the mixing as people flowed outwards from these ‘cradles of
humanity’, as the Herschfelds called them, to populate the world.
Their Lancet paper is a classic, and rightly so. It was the first of its kind and it opened up an
entirely new field of research in anthropology. It follows on from the implicit assumption in John
Beddoe’s research on physical appearance that inherited features can be used to explore the origins
of people. Compared to the work on hair and eye colour, skull shape and so on, blood groups come
one step closer to the fundamental controller of genetic inheritance, DNA. However, no one knew
about the way DNA conducted the business of inheritance at the time the Herschfelds were at their
peak, nor for several decades afterwards. Blood groups, though still an indirect manifestation of
the underlying DNA, were a definite improvement on the earlier, subjective parameters which
were all that were available to John Beddoe and his Victorian contemporaries.
For one thing, it completely removed prejudice and human error from the equation. Blood
groups are tightly defined and there is no overlap between them. No matter who does the tests,
someone in group B will always be in group B. It doesn’t alter with age. There is no room for
doubt, at least not about the accuracy of the observation. But there is also a noticeable shift in the
tone of the reports. There are no longer any barely concealed inferences of racial character, like the
free-spirited, fair-haired Saxon who will not be tied to the drudgery of an urban existence but
would rather make his fortune overseas, or the morose, dark-haired Shetlander driven to despair by
drinking too many cups of tea. All that nonsense vanishes, as it is very hard to get worked up about
the comparative personal characteristics of one blood group over another. The American physician
William Boyd, who extended the Herschfelds’ work around the globe, expressed this new sense
when he wrote, ‘In certain parts of the world an individual will be considered inferior if he has,
for instance, a dark skin but in no part of the world does possession of a blood group A gene
exclude him from the best society.’ As a group A myself, that comes as something of a relief.
The Herschfelds’ final legacy was less glorious. Their grand conclusions about the dual origins
of humanity turned out to be completely wrong. It took the discovery of other blood group systems,