Blood transfusion began in the 1660s, after William Harvey described the circulation in 1628, when Richard Lower transfused blood between dogs in 1666. In 1667 Jean Baptiste Denys transfused calf's blood into a man with psychosis, who died soon after, and Denys faced a murder trial. Bans followed in many countries until James Blundell's 1818 transfusion from husband to wife, which showed that blood transfers reliably only within a species. Karl Landsteiner identified the ABO blood groups in 1901, and sodium citrate later allowed storage and the first blood banks in 1937. Many early banks paid donors, and wartime blood programs in the US were racially segregated, which Charles Drew protested. Restrictions on gay and bisexual men were lifted in stages until the FDA ended the last sexual-orientation criteria in 2023.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.