Leonard "Tank" Charpier, a graduate of Curtis High School in Chicago, was an all-conference guard and fullback in each of the two respective seasons he lettered at Illinois (1916 & '17) for Coach Bob Zuppke.
After one season of playing for the Racine Cardinals (1920), he studied medicine and eventually became a surgeon at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Chicago's south suburbs.
Charpier experimented in the 1930s with using blood from recently-deceased cadavers for transfusions. His work didn't come to light until 13 years after Charpier's death in 1960. Former assistant Donald Farmer, who by then was director of the Beverly Blood Center in Chicago, published an article about Charpier's work in the Bulletin of the American Association of Blood Banks.