Blood drive season is back, and U of T is getting in on the act, as always. Last Monday, second-year medical students Kelsey Mills and Melissa Zelsman organized a drive that managed to gather 94 much-needed units of blood for the Canadian Blood Services. That’s up from the 81 units collected at last year’s drive.
Decades ago, the campus was more a lot competitive about voluntary bloodletting. There was even a trophy presented to the college or faculty with the highest percentage of students giving blood. In 1968, the faculty of dentistry won the Carling Cup for the second year in a row when 50.2 per cent of its students gave blood. Ironically, coming in last place was the faculty of medicine-only one per cent of students were willing to bleed!
Engineering students took the competition to new extremes in the 1950s. When UC had the worst participation rate during a university-wide blood drive, a group of engineers sawed off and stole the wooden gryphon perched atop the banister in UC’s east stairway. The engineers refused to give the gryphon back unless UC students donated more blood than any other college. UC met the challenge, and the gryphon was returned home.
Source: U of T Magazine (Winter 2006), The Varsity (Wed, Nov 13, 1968)
-Mayce Al-Sukhni
