Bernard Fantus

Bernard Fantus (September 1, 1874 – April 14, 1940) was a Hungarian Jewish-American physician. He established the first hospital blood bank in the United States in 1937 at Cook County Hospital, Chicago while he served there as director of the pharmacology and therapeutics department.

Bernard Fantus was born to David and Ida (Gentilli) Fantus in Budapest, Hungary. As a child, Fantus was educated at Real-Gymnasium in Vienna, Austria. From a young age, his parents supported his ambition to be a physician. In 1889, at the age of fifteen, he and his parents immigrated to the United States. In Detroit, Michigan, Fantus was an apprentice for Mr. Leushner at Paul Leuchner's Drug store, who began training him in pharmacy. By 1902 the family relocated to Chicago, Illinois.

Fantus received his Doctor of Medicine in 1899 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons (Chicago).He furthered his education by doing post-graduate work at the University of Strasbourg in 1906 and the University of Berlin in 1909. Fantus also received a Master of Science from the University of Michigan in 1917, where he had done research in Pharmacology with Professor Cushny during the summer of 1901.

Fantus married Emily Senn, a nurse who he met at Cook County Hospital, on September 1, 1907. He had a daughter named Ruth.

After suffering a heart attack the year prior, Fantus died on April 14, 1940, at the age of sixty-five. Fantus was buried at Forest Home Cemetery (Chicago).

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From about 1910–1915, at the Pharmacological Laboratory of the University of Illinois, Fantus conducted research in order to formulate medications that were more enjoyable to children. Knowing that medication in the form of candy would be best for children, Fantus studied candy confection and worked with candy-makers in order to determine that "sweet tablets" would be the best way to administer medicine to kids in a candy form. Fantus' goal was to create medications that were not only palatable to children, but relatively easy and inexpensive to make, in order for them to be readily available and accessible to the public. Strong emphasis was put on the ability of the tablet to dissolve, to be an attractive color, and to have a palatable sweet flavor not reminiscent of typical medicine.

In order to make sweet tablets, one needs a tablet machine. Fantus recommends the No. 25 Machine from the Whitall Tatum Company, which, at the time, was effective and inexpensive at only ten dollars.