Blood Work (14 page)

If animal flesh and blood had long been part of the standard medical regimen in his day, Denis found it logical to shorten the route that the blood had to take through the human digestive system and to place it directly into the veins. There was now a real possibility of curing disease efficiently and directly through blood from a donor with qualities perfectly suited to the humors of the recipient—even if that donor was not itself human.

As Perrault mobilized the Paris medical establishment against transfusion, Denis continued to press forward with abandon. Thanks to the now-marginalized-but-still-wealthy Montmor, Denis
was flush with funds and supplies to take his blood studies as far as he could. His intentions were clear: He would without delay be the first to try this radical new procedure on humans—and he would use animal blood. And what better choice than a sheep for this monumental experiment? Lamb of God, blood of Christ: Nothing could be more pure.

B
y mid-June 1667 Denis found a good candidate for his radical procedure when he was called to the home of a boy, barely sixteen years old. The patient had suffered from uncontrollable fevers for two months straight, and barber-surgeons had bled the boy more than twenty times, to no effect. Denis does not tell us how he was able to persuade the patient and his parents to submit to the experiment, although, given what we know of similar cases, we can speculate that some payment may have been involved. At five o'clock in the morning—before the teenager had a chance to stir from bed and heat up his already boiling blood—Denis and his barber-surgeon companion Emmerez tied a tourniquet around the patient's arm. They bled three ounces from him: three ounces of the blackest, most putrefied blood they said they had ever seen. On cue, the family butcher brought in a lamb and set to work opening its carotid artery. The patient and the animal were soon linked by rudimentary metal tubes. Denis reported that the young man shuddered as he felt a strong sensation of heat in his arm, a sign of a mild hemolytic transfusion reac
tion. Then, according to Denis, his body relaxed as an immediate feeling of coolness and peace overcame him.

FIGURE 18:
Animal-to-human transfusion. Mathias Gottfried Purmann (1705).

By the next morning the teenager was alert, agile, and seemingly cured of his lengthy illness. Emboldened, Denis paid a healthy, middle-aged man to undergo a similar transfusion, “more by curiosity than by necessity.” The records indicate that the patient was a butcher, perhaps the very one recruited as a helper in the transfusionist's earlier experiment.
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By profession, the man lacked a fear of blood and remained jovial as he marveled
at his pulsing veins, presumably ripe with sheep blood. Once the procedure was over, he leaped merrily from the table and flayed the donor lamb in an impressive show of his professional skills. Not one to waste a good animal, he then asked Denis if he might take the lamb home for supper.

Pleased with the results of the experiment, Denis was nonetheless enraged to find the man at the tavern a few hours later, as boisterous as ever—and drunk. In the late seventeenth century, just about every crowded city street in Paris had at least two or three such watering holes. Sporting names such as La Fosse aux Lions (the Lions' Ditch) and Le Berceau (the Cradle), taverns were sites for locals to imbibe, quarrel, meet prostitutes, or just unwind from the fatigue of everyday life in the bustling capital.
²
Paris was heaven for drinkers, and the butcher was a drinker. The transfusionist had paid the butcher in money as well as meals, and now grimaced as he saw how it had been spent. The staggering man slung an arm over Denis' shoulder and, slurring his words, said he had never felt better. When could he and his drinking buddies get another one of these blood experiments? As annoyed as Denis was, his patient's enthusiasm confirmed—of this the transfusionist was certain—the brilliance of his work. Maybe the man's good spirits were the result of the transfusion or maybe it was just the wine that had also flooded his veins. In any event there was indeed cause for celebration: The man was still alive.

On June 25, 1667, Denis sat confidently at his writing desk, dipped his pen in the inkwell, and drafted a letter to Montmor that laid out every detail of his successes. Denis' “Letter Concerning a New Way of Sundry Diseases by Transfusion of Blood” may have seemed intended as a private correspondence between the transfusionist and his patron, but nothing could have been further from the reality. After all, Montmor had attended many of the transfusion experiments himself and knew firsthand the
details of these procedures. As soon as the ink was barely dry on the stiff parchment pages, Denis' letter was instead whisked off to a printer's shop on Paris's rue Saint-Jacques and would soon be distributed broadly both in Paris and, of course, across the Channel.

In the letter, Denis claimed to be the first physician to have performed a human blood transfusion. This was more than the English could bear. To their great consternation Jean-Baptiste Denis was an imitator par excellence. His idea to transfuse dogs was inspired directly by the experiments performed at the Royal Society. Indeed, the Frenchman's move to cross-species experiments had been pulled directly from the pages of Boyle and Lower's sixteen-point memo in the
Philosophical Transactions.

The animosities surrounding blood transfusion were not simply a matter of scientific rivalries; they were one more piece of an increasingly complex political puzzle. The globe was ever-expanding in this age of scientific and cultural exploration, and the ports of each of the major European countries—France, England, Holland, and Spain—teemed with activity as ships set off to stake claims on portions of the world that had only recently been discovered. This quest to dominate the trade routes to and from the New World and Asia exacerbated long-standing tensions among the European nations. Peace, when it could be had, was built around fragile alliances, treaties, and royal marriages. Unrest between two or more of these major political and military powerhouses could set all of Europe on edge and, if not contained, could light the entire continent on fire. It was often on the broad expanses of the high seas that the greatest threats to international relations loomed—and sometimes for the smallest of reasons. Custom had long dictated that two ships of different nationalities should salute each other when passing at sea. This was accomplished by firing a salvo of cannons or briefly low
ering colors. But the ever-haughty Louis XIV bristled at naval convention and ordered his admirals and commanders to insist that every foreign ship display submissive homage to the French colors. Not surprisingly other nations resisted mightily—and to such degree that French and English ships, in particular, tried to avoid one another entirely in order to avert certain conflict.
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The year 1667 was marked not only by Denis' now-infamous animal-to-human blood trials. It was also a year when international relations had been pushed to their limits. France found itself pitted once again against its Spanish neighbors as the two countries battled over rights to the Spanish Netherlands. Spain had long held control of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands. In 1648, after eighty years of war, the northern provinces had been granted independence. The southern territories that now comprise Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of northern France, however, remained under Spanish control. The Sun King was eager to annex this small area between France and the Netherlands to his own empire. And following the death of the Spanish king Philip IV, Louis was convinced that his wife, Marie-Thérèse, the eldest daughter of Philip's first marriage, had full rights to the territory as part of her father's succession. Of course Spain resisted, claiming that those rights were to be transferred instead to the children of Philip's second marriage, who were still minors.

The “War of Devolution,” as it was called, became still more complicated when the independent Dutch provinces found themselves at war with England. The Netherlands had experienced phenomenal success in the spice colonies and had quickly established itself as a major economic player in late-seventeenth-century Europe. As allies of the Dutch, the French were drawn back into battle with the English. Yet Louis XIV was urged by his advisers to be cautious in his dealings with Charles II. Rumors
were afloat that the English king was more than ready to align himself with Spain. This would complicate French designs on the Low Countries and launch France into what could be a decades-long war on multiple fronts. Louis XIV offered naval assistance to the Dutch, but he ordered his forces to avoid at all costs engaging directly with the English.

While the king may have shown uncharacteristic restraint, Jean-Baptiste Denis was not so politic in his dealings with the English. If Denis had found few friends among his fellow countrymen, he would soon find still even fewer among the English. The transfusionist had declared his own one-man war against England's Royal Society. And the influential secretary of the society, Henry Oldenburg, would not quickly forgive Denis his transgressions.

Oldenburg spent his days reading, organizing, translating, and responding to the letters that flooded his mailbox. The amount of work required was, as he complained to Boyle, simply overwhelming: “I am sure no man imagines what store of papers and writings pass to and from me in a week from time to time, [of] which I rid myself without any assistance. I have no less at present than thirty correspondents, partly domestic, partly foreign. Many of them I am not only to write to, but also to do business for, which requires much time to inquire after such particulars and dispatch such business.”
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Oldenburg's work was a true labor of love. It had to be, for his was certainly not a position that offered much financial reward. The job of secretary of the Royal Society was not salaried; in fact Oldenburg received only rare reimbursement for his endless paper, ink, and postage expenses. He had earned some money by doing private translations for Royal Society colleagues, especially Boyle, and by writing news-filled letters to virtuosi outside London, but he frequently lamented his pennilessness and was always
seeking new sources of revenue. Plague, fire, and unscrupulous publishers had created nearly insurmountable obstacles for Oldenburg. To complicate his financial situation still more, his wife of just a year and a half died in the months following the first issue of the
Philosophical Transactions.
The widower was obliged to commit the bulk of his wife's modest dowry to her funeral. While the publication had been successful, it hardly brought in the money that he so desperately needed. “What was hoped,” Oldenburg lamented bitterly to Boyle, “might have brought me in about £150 per annum…. will now scarce amount to £50.”
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He later estimated that his work as editor brought in even less, just £40. Given the extraordinary number of letters Oldenburg wrote and received, it is not easy to understand how he shouldered what would have been exorbitant postal expenses. In early Europe it was the responsibility of the recipient to pay all postage expenses at the time of delivery—and the expenses were not insignificant. A single sheet of paper traveling just eighty miles within England could cost upwards of twopence. Yet a large percentage of Oldenburg's letters came from the Continent, which would have likely quadrupled the fees, or more.
⁶

It was well known across England that Oldenburg actually corresponded frequently with Dutch and French scholars at the Paris Academy of Sciences: Auzout, Petit, and Huygens. He had also recently begun exchanging letters with Henri Justel, Louis XIV's personal secretary, who shared the latest scuttlebutt from the French court. And now, at the height of tensions with the French and their allies the Dutch, news of Denis' experiments had been arriving with some regularity at Oldenburg's home. On June 20, 1667, Oldenburg received the letter that would set off a series of fireworks in the English scientific community—fireworks that would not be extinguished until well into the next fall.
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In the weeks and months that followed his first animal-to-
human experiments, Denis was in the thick of launching a major self-publicity campaign. In his announcements Denis conveniently neglected to acknowledge his debt to the English. He mentioned neither Harvey or Wren nor Lower or Boyle, on whose work his own experiment had so obviously relied. In scientific circles it had long been the tradition to recognize, however briefly, the forerunners to a particular theory or discovery before launching into a celebratory description of one's own successes. But Denis had cast aside the work of the Englishmen who were now well-known across Europe for their blood studies. Instead he had begun his letter with a proclamation that blood transfusion was first proposed in France. In his opening comments to Montmor, he wrote:

The Frenchman credited the idea of blood transfusion to a man few had heard of—a man of whom little historical trace is left. According to Denis' account, an unknown Benedictine monk, Dom Robert Desgabets, first proposed the idea of “blood
transfer” (
communication du sang
) to the Montmorians in July 1658. Desgabets suggested that donor blood could be collected in a leather pouch and then poured into a silver pipe. One end of the pipe would be large, like a funnel, to receive the blood. The other end would be thin and narrow, so that it could penetrate the vein of an animal or a human. No trials were performed using this method, but Desgabets' ideas—asserted Denis—were proof enough that blood transfusion was French.