George Washington Crile was raised on a farm near Chili, Ohio, and educated in a one-room school house near his home. In 1881, he went to Northwestern Ohio Normal School (now Ohio Northern University) in Ada, Ohio. He worked his way through school by teaching in elementary schools, and he became interested in medicine. In 1886 he went to Wooster Medical College (now Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine) in Cleveland, graduating in 1887 with his M.D. After his internship, he entered private surgical practice, and became primarily interested in the study of shock.
From 1889-1900, he taught at the University of Wooster, and from 1900 at the Western Reserve University. He went abroad, to Vienna and London in 1892 and 1895, for further study. In 1897 he won the Cartwright Prize from Columbia University for his paper "An Experimental Research into Surgical Shock," which became his first book when it was in 1899.
In 1903, he published his studies in shock and blood pressure during operations in the book Blood Pressure in Surgery. He also revealed a "pneumatic rubber suit " he had invented to decrease postural hypotension in neuro surgical patients, and his invention was used in the second world war to prevent pilots from blacking out and during the Vietnam war to stabilise patients with haemorrhagic shock. In 1906, he performed the first successful blood transfusion from one human to another in the United States.
In 1910 he was appointed Clinical Professor of Surgery of the newly-amalgamated Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He was also Chair of Surgery at that school's teaching hospital, Lakeside Hospital, which he had helped establish. In 1913 he was elected an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
During the World War I, he organised U.S. Army Base Hospital 4, largely from Lakeside Hospital, which was the first detachment of the American Expeditionary Forces to arrive in France, in 1917. He wrote a book about the war, A Mechanistic View of War and Peace (1917).
After the war, he continued to work in private surgical practice. In 1921, along with other doctors in his practice, he established non-profit Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and he became its director. The foundation burnt down in 1929 when some x-ray films in the basement caught fire.
Crile published 24 books and more than 400 papers. In addition to being the first surgeon to have performed a direct blood transfusion, he contributed to many other aspects of medicine, including neck dissection, the design of a haemostatic forceps called the Crile mosquito clamp, and the development of an anaesthetic technique known as balanced anaesthesia.
