to begin with plasma until time permits a more careful study of the patient.
There is probably no service which the civilian can render to the fighting forces so valuable as the gift of blood.
Before the raid on Pearl Harbor, both the Army and the Navy medical officers there thought that they had sufficient dried plasma on hand for any emergency. The Naval Hospital had 500 units. A unit of plasma is 250 cc. But no one had any conception of the enormous number of severely burned cases the Medical Corps would be called upon to treat, nor the tremendous amounts of plasma that would be required for these cases.
A call was sent to the Honolulu County Medical Society in the need for plasma. Their Medical Preparedness Committee, with the aid of the Chamber of Commerce, had established a plasma bank just six months before the raid occurred. By November the blood bank had attained its goal of 200 flasks of plasma. In response to appeals by the Army and Navy, seventy-five flasks were sent to the Army's Tripler General Hospital, forty-five to the Naval Hospital, and eighty flasks to Queens Hospital for civilian use.
In view of the urgent need, a radio appeal for blood donors was broadcast. The response to this was dramatic and overwhelming. For two weeks donors were bled at the rate of fifty an hour, ten hours a day, seven days a week. Every available doctor and nurse in the islands was called upon to assist. Men and women waited in line for hours to donate their blood: society women and defense workers; laborers from the docks and plantations; passengers and crews from vessels in port and, when they were able, soldiers and sailors on liberty. The question most commonly asked was, "How soon can I come again?" In these two weeks of continuous work over five thousand pints of blood were obtained for plasma: 2,500,000 cc. This answered the need until more plasma could be obtained from the mainland.
One of the vitally important lessons learned at Pearl Harbor was the necessity for hospitals or any medical activity in areas sub-
