Osborne Brines, M.D. ’27, was born April 19, 1894, in Algonac, Mich. He obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1915 and during the 1920s taught chemistry and physiology at what would become Wayne State University. He earned his medical degree in 1927 from the Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery, where he was appointed to the position of instructor in Pathology upon graduation. Two years later he was promoted to assistant professor, and in 1931 he became a pathologist and director of the laboratories at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Between 1923 and 1956 he published nine articles on blood transfusions and hospital blood banks, which had become one of his major interests. In 1937 he established one of the nation’s first two hospital blood banks at Receiving Hospital.

During WWII, Brines served in the Navy Medical Corps, stationed in the South Pacific, rising to the rank of captain. Upon return to civilian life in 1946, he became professor and chair of the Department of Pathology at the Wayne University School of Medicine, where he remained until his death in 1960.

During his career, he served as president of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists from 1948 to 1949, and was the first American elected president of the International Society of Clinical Pathology, a three-year term, in 1957. In 1954 Dr. Brines was honored by Wayne University with the Alumni Award for Distinguished Service, and in 1959 he received the Ward Burdick Award for “outstanding contributions to pathology” during a joint meeting of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists and the College of American Pathologists in Chicago.