Blood Work (13 page)

There has been some speculation more recently that Barbara Urselin and Tannakin Skinker both showed signs of atavism. That is, their bodies exhibited the reemergence of a lost physical trait or behavior that was once typical in remote animal ancestors. A few examples of atavism in humans are the presence of extra nipples, a tail-like growth, or excessive hairiness. However, most medi
cal historians concur that Barbara was most likely suffering from acute congenital hypertrichosis, an extraordinarily rare genetic disorder. And in the case of Tannakin Skinker, her piglike features were more likely the result of a severe facial malformation that allowed the girl to speak only in squeaking noises, giving rise to rumors that became more and more fanciful over time.
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In the absence of genetic explanations for such misshapen women, however, early European thinkers had little recourse but to assign either divine or diabolical causes for the existence of “monsters.” The Renaissance writer Ambroise Paré classified monsters into categories based on their origins. Some had been willed by God as a divine sign or portent that, if read correctly, could allow the prognosticator a privileged glimpse into heavenly mysteries. Others were the direct work of the devil, human frailty, or both. For example, writers suspected that Tannakin Skinker had been bewitched in utero after her mother had refused to give money to an old beggar woman. And for both Tannakin and Barbara Urselin, speculation swirled that their mothers had themselves been lusty witches who had copulated with the devil (hence Tannakin's cloven hooves) or had, at the very least, been fathered by animals.

Aristotle's notion of the Great Chain of Being had long held that nature was organized according to strict hierarchies, with God and angels at the top, followed by humans, animals, and then plants. But what rung of the
scala naturae
(nature's ladder) did such odd beasts inhabit?
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Indeed, from the Middle Ages into the early seventeenth century, these “monsters” actually reinforced the natural order more than they subverted it. They served as a most welcome sign that there was indeed a teleological order in nature. As a term derived from the Latin
monstrare
(to point out), “monsters” reminded and reassured humankind that there was, after all, a purposeful organization of the uni
verse that was specifically willed by God. Misshapen humans—whether actually seen or simply the product of an active early European imagination—offered a welcome opportunity to gain access to God's mysteries. If there were odd, imperfect hybrid creatures roaming the world, their purpose was to reinforce the idea that perfection did exist. In these specific instances nature's rules were broken. But for rules to be broken, there first had to be rules. These anomalies were meant to be isolated, examined, and understood not just as an intellectual exercise but as an act of faith that God had a plan for everything—even for those things that made, on the face of it, little sense.

But how could there be both monsters and a divine, inviolable design? This was the most perplexing question of all. A precious few monsters were, as men like Paré could only reluctantly conclude, simply the result of nature gone awry. In the absence of any plausible divine or diabolical origin, stunted or missing limbs could be seen only as the result of insufficient amounts of “seed” during the sex act. Extra limbs or even conjoined twins followed from too much. For early philosophers the only way to make sense of this was to remind themselves that nothing in the universe was perfect other than God. Even man, created in God's image, was only a poor imitation. Everything in the natural world, humans included, was riddled with imperfection—some were just more horrifically imperfect than others. And now it looked as if natural philosophers would soon be able to engineer their own unclassifiable “monsters.”

Boyle was not the only one who was fascinated by the possibility of transmutation and the creation of hybrid species through blood exchange. The protestant Queen Christina of Sweden mused that “the invention of injecting blood is all very fine, but I should not like to try it myself, for fear that I might turn into a sheep. But if I were to experience a metamorphosis, I should pre
fer to become a female lion, so that no one could devour me.”
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Such questions also delighted Englishmen like Samuel Pepys, who mused over pints of ale what could happen if the “blood of a Quaker [were] let into an Archbishop?”
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Pepys's playful reference to religion evokes the reformationist mindset that extended into nearly all aspects of Protestant intellectual life, including and especially medicine. “If Luther could break from Rome,” suggests one prominent historian, “how could it be impious to demand the reformation of medicine?”
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And transfusion—associated as it was with the radical theory of circulation and the iconoclastic practices of alchemy—sat squarely in such efforts. For English physicians and natural philosophers, Luther indeed had an equivalent in medical practice and theory: the alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541), who insisted that everything in the universe—including humans—was, at the core, made up of minerals and metals such as arsenic, lead, copper, iron, and gold. But three in particular dominated them all: salt, mercury, and sulfur. Each part of the human body was controlled by an
archeus
(master spirit) that mixed, stirred, and transmutated these metals and minerals together to promote good health. Using the language of alchemical tools and materials—stills, casks, filters—to describe the inner workings of the body, Paracelsus argued that disease was what happened when something went awry in the “alchemist's kitchen.”
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If disease was brought on by alchemical processes, then the physician must be first and foremost an alchemist to cure it.

Welcomed in Protestant England, Paracelsus was loathed by many in Catholic France—and blood transfusion and talk of transmutation did not help the matter any.
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With its perceived links to alchemy, blood transfusion opened up old wounds from an ideological battle the Paris Faculty of Medicine had been waging since the late sixteenth century and had every intention
of winning now. Paracelsus's irreverent theories had long ago turned the northern and southern faculties of medicine—in particular, Perrault's Paris and Denis' Montpellier—against each other. Hostile to the theories of Paracelsus and his followers, the Paris faculty decreed in 1566 that the use of chemically based remedies was to be expressly prohibited. More open to Reformationist approaches to medicine, the Montpellier faculty promoted regular use of antimony—a Paracelsian chemical cure par excellence—to treat a broad range of illnesses, from plague to paralysis, from asthma to allergies. Antimony, a metalloid, is now used in the production of electronics, flameproof coatings, and enamels. But in the early modern era, it was prized by some for its powerful emetic properties, which could be used to purge the body of other illness-causing minerals and metals. The Italian physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli had made a convincing argument, at least for Montpellerian practitioners, that antimony's action on the body was similar to its presumed action in alchemical experiments. With the help of antimony, impurities could be freed from gold. Since gold was the most perfect of metals, and man the most perfect of beings on earth, it made sense that antimony could also be used to remove impurities from the human body.
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In 1667, the same year as Denis' experiments, parliament reversed the 1566 decree that forbade the use of chemical remedies. The groundwork for the reversal had been laid some nine years earlier, in 1658, when Louis XIV took ill during a military campaign in Flanders. His personal physicians tried every remedy they knew to cure their patient, but it was only after a local doctor administered antimony that the king returned to good health. Following the parliamentary decree, a prominent member of the Paris medical school declared, “These doctors say that a poison is not a poison in the hands of a good physician. They
speak against their own experience because most of them have killed their wives, their children, and their friends.”
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With the advent of transfusion, coupled with setbacks in regard to antimony, the philosophical conflicts between the two faculties reached fever pitch. As Denis forged ahead with his transfusion experiments, he refused to yield to Perrault's declarations—and by extension those of both the Academy of Sciences and the Paris Faculty of Medicine—that blood transfusion was not an acceptable avenue of medical inquiry. As such, the Montpellier-trained Denis represented something of a return of the repressed—a reincarnation of a battle decades earlier that had clearly not been resolved. And now the battle had taken a turn for the worse. Following the suggestions of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society, Denis was preparing to transfuse a variety of different animals one to the other—and soon would be turning to interspecies trials with humans. For men like Perrault and others, the idea was not only unacceptable—it was terrifying. As Perrault himself had warned unequivocally, to meddle with blood could mean only one thing: great peril.
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A
s the winter of 1667 slowly gave way to spring, Montmor's Italianate gardens began to display a welcome show of color. Clusters of flowers were tucked inside low evergreen hedges that formed compact designs. Along the back walls of Montmor's private haven, the chestnut trees took bud and began to obscure from view the estate's kitchen gardens, which lay hidden behind its main walls. A stableman shoveled mounds of horse manure onto the leek and potato beds while members of the domestic staff plucked insects from the cabbage patch and folded lettuce greens into their aprons. Costumed in the fresh-pressed clothes of the nobleman he aspired to be, Denis walked along a row of cages lining the perimeter of the formal garden. There he inspected the dogs that Montmor's servants imported daily to serve as his experimental subjects.

From the window of the first-floor reception hall, Montmor likely stole a peek at his protégé's work with excitement and satisfaction. Once the gardens had crackled with intellectual energy. Birds had flown out of the trees in panic as the engineer
Pierre Petit had tested the trajectory of bullets shot from guns loaded with different mixtures of saltpeter, and no metal object had been safe from the physicist Jacques Rohault's experiments with magnets. And on cool days the great physician Jean Pecquet, for whom a structure in the thoracic duct (Pecquet's Cistern) was later named, had performed dissections on a host of animals, not to mention a human corpse or two.
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So many of these men had packed up and headed to the Academy of Sciences that the gardens were now empty, save for Denis and his assistants. But Montmor was sure that if his bet paid off with Denis, the others—the ones who had abandoned him—would soon be begging to return.

With the help of Emmerez and the lackeys Montmor supplied, Denis patiently worked his way through a logical progression of experimental techniques. He transfused pairs of dogs from artery to vein, vein to vein, neck to neck, leg to leg, in dogs “both weak and strong, great and small.” By Denis' account the experiments had been successful. Of the nineteen dogs on which they experimented, not one died.

Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Denis announced his success far and wide. With the support of Montmor, Denis submitted written reports of his work to the
Journal des sçavans
and struck up a correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, the editor of the
Philosophical Transactions,
in the hope that his successes would find their way into the influential English journal. In short order this once-unknown young doctor from Montpellier and his cause célèbre had taken center stage in the debates of the European scientific community. And with each day that passed, the outsider Denis earned himself new enemies.

When Denis had finished his last dog-to-dog transfusion, the transfusionist announced confidently to Montmor that he was working on ideas to “drive the business yet a little further.” He
would, following in Boyle's footsteps, turn next to the possibilities of transfusing animals from different species.
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On a crisp day in early April 1667, Denis readied his experiment in Montmor's gardens; this time his host joined him. A shipment of several calves and a selection of dogs for Denis' next experiment, brought in by the stablemen, awaited the transfusionist.

Denis inspected each of the animals and chose his next subjects. A large makeshift table groaned as Montmor's stablemen wrestled with one of the young but still heavy cows. After a few minutes they had restrained it by an elaborate system of ropes secured to thick metal stakes pounded into the ground. The animal now lay paralyzed in fear, looking up at its experimenters with large, bulging eyes.

Then they turned their attention to the small dog that would be joining the calf on the table. If the stablemen thought it would be easier to restrain the dog, they were wrong. The dog nipped at and bit anyone who tried to come close. After some wrangling and many scratches, the men had triumphed over the beast. Scalpels in hand, Denis and Emmerez stepped forward as they had done countless times before. The recalcitrant dog fought back as the first incision was made. But its menacing growls soon gave way to loud, rhythmic, high-pitched yelps that quieted slowly with each pulse of blood that poured from the animal's body. Calf's blood flowed through the now familiar setup of metal tubes and into the dog. Denis and Emmerez bled the calf dry, and the animal spasmed as it took its last breath. The dog's breathing was also shallow and labored; it lived but remained weak. By the end of the experiment, both men stood together in the crimson puddle that encircled their worktable.

Denis repeated the experiment two more times, each time transfusing calf blood into a dog. “The animals into whom the blood has been transmitted,” Denis reported proudly in the pages of the
Journal des sçavans,
“all of them eat as well as before, and one of these three dogs, from whom the day before so much blood had been drawn, that he could hardly stir any more, having been supplied the next morning with the blood of a Calf, recover'd instantly his strength and showed a surprising vigor.”
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Continuing his experiments, he crowded still more animals onto the transfusion table: Three sheep were transfused with three dogs, a young cow with a dog, and a horse with four goats. As usual Denis made certain that news of his experiment was published in the
Journal des sçavans
just days later. The transfusionist failed to make any mention of the English influence on his work, or of Boyle's lengthy memo about the next directions in interspecies trials.

But the English were, like Denis, also hard at it. As early as January 1667 Oldenburg reported to a colleague in a private letter that the Royal Society was “now busy with the experiment of transfusing the blood of one animal into another, either of the same species or of a different one. Whether that will bring about any change in the creature's nature or not will soon appear, unless perhaps winter's severity by causing the blood to become stagnant and thick hinders it.”
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A few months later the physician Edmund King reported that had not seen any species changes—yet—in his own experiments, but did say he had witnessed some dramatic transformations in the health of the animals who received interspecies blood. In the pages of the
Philosophical Transactions
he described how he had transfused more than forty-five ounces of calf's blood into a sheep. The sheep was “very strong and lusty” afterward and was sent back out to pasture without complications. Writing in the same issue, Thomas Coxe acknowledged that he, too, had transfused “an old Mungrell Curr, all over-run with the Mange” with the blood of a young and healthy spaniel. “The effect of which Experiment was,” Coxe reported, “no alteration at all, any way, to be observed in the Sound Dog.
But for the Mangy Dog, he was in about ten days or a fortnight's space perfectly cured.”
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Thus the English were more attached than ever to the idea that transfusing or otherwise manipulating blood could produce transformative results. In fact some natural philosophers were so duped by their own scientific ambitions and eager hopes that they lost sight of their ability to judge the results of their experiences objectively. For example, as King reported in the
Philosophical Transactions
, he infused a sheep with milk and sugar. He claimed the results were anything but “distasteful” in fact, the animal was “more than ordinarily sweet, according to the opinion of many that ate of it.”
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As the English continued to press forward with their experiments, Denis knew he had little time to waste if he wanted to maintain his lead in the transfusion race. His work became still more urgent when he learned that the Italians were also now attempting the experiments—and were making some dramatic claims about the effects. During the Renaissance, Italy had been the center of cutting-edge science, claiming Leonardo, Galileo, Vesalius, and many others as its sons. Now, a century later, the Italians had been eclipsed by the French and, especially, the English. Rumors had been buzzing in Rome and in the prominent medical center of Bologna that blood transfusion would return Italy to its rightful place on the world's scientific stage.
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On March 28, 1667—just two weeks after the
Journal des sçavans
published Denis' first report of successful canine tranfusions—the natural philosopher Giovanni Cassini performed experiments on sheep. By that May—again just weeks after Denis' cross-transfusion experiments with dogs, goats, horses, and cows—the Italians began interspecies experiments. In his home in Udine a surgeon named Griffoni brought his own spaniel to the operating table. The dog was thirteen years old, was deaf, and had difficulty
walking. Griffoni transfused lamb's blood into the dog's veins and left it to recover for an hour, untied, on the table. Griffoni and his colleagues moved to another room following the experiment—and were delighted when the dog reportedly jumped off the experiment table and bounded into the room where the men were drinking and relaxing. Within weeks the surgeon swore that the dog had been cured of its deafness—or almost. The dog returned at least “sometimes at the voice of his Masters.”
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Not long after, one Ippolito Magnani fine-tuned the tools used in transfusion, rejecting metal tubes in favor of glass ones in an experiment that mixed the blood of two goats with that of two dogs. He was pleased to note that the blood flowed more freely in glass than in metal.
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And by the fall of 1667 the transfusionist and respected doctor Paolo Manfredi had gained the support of major courtly benefactors including Marie Mancini, former mistress of Louis XIV and niece of the Cardinal Mazarin, his former prime minister, for whom he may have also demonstrated the experiment in the family's sprawling Palazzo Colonna in Rome.
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With the competition becoming more intense with every passing day, Denis remained stubbornly convinced that ultimate victory would belong only to whoever succeeded in performing the first transfusion in humans. Finding neither “reasons nor evidence” sufficient to shake his belief in transfusion, Denis felt that the only remaining issue was to decide on the donor for the experiments in humans. Denis immediately ruled out suggestions that it would be best to use the blood of the same species—that is, to attempt human-to-human transfusions. It was, he believed, “barbarous” to shorten the life of one man to extend the life of another. “Many had conceiv'd,” Denis explained, “that if ever the transfusion of blood should come to be practis'd upon men, it ought to be done with blood of the same species…. But for my part, I am far
from that Opinion, and I am persuaded that it will be much more expedient to make use of the blood of other Animals.”
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The advantages of animal blood were self-evident to Denis. Greater quantities of blood could be drawn from animals because they are often larger than humans. And finally and most important: Animals did not drink, swear, or overindulge their passions. Animals are less subject to the “sadness, envy, anger, melancholy, disgust, and generally all the passions that trouble the life of man and corrupt the whole substance of the blood.”
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Even the blood of young children is less preferable to that of animals because infants suckle breast milk, which was understood at the time to be produced through a distillation of the blood in the breasts. And a mother's milk, like her blood, was subject to the same “corruptions.” As Denis explained to Montmor, “Animal blood necessarily has fewer impurities than human blood.” Their blood was, in a word, untainted.

As counterintuitive as it may seem to us today, it makes perfect sense that Denis would prefer animals over humans as donors in his groundbreaking blood transfusion experiments. Animal flesh and fluids were prescribed for centuries for every ailment imaginable. Printed and manuscript “Physick Books” contained myriad recipes for animal-based ointments, compresses, tinctures, and capsules to be used in home healing. One common treatment for consumption called for a live cock: “Slit him down the back and take out his Intrals, cut him in quarters, and bruise him in a Mortar, with his Head, Legs, Heart, Liver and Gizard; put him into an ordinary Still with a Pottle of sack sherry.” Still more elaborate was a cure for kidney stones:

Each animal was classified according to its perceived helpfulness in healing specific parts of the body. The flesh of foxes was considered helpful for persons who suffered from pulmonary problems, and their livers were a good nutritional supplement for those with “sweet urine” (diabetes). Beaver meat could be used to supplement the diets of those who had stomach problems or, for women, “womb troubles.” Deer were something of a cure-all. Both folk remedies and learned medical manuals touted their ability to cure a variety of maladies: plague, smallpox, mumps, rheumatoid arthritis, cataracts, paralysis, and impotence.
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