Picture the scene. The worthies of the Royal Society gathered around a table. A slightly barmy curate. A sheep, some sharpened quills and a set of silver tubes. It is November 1667, a year after the Great Fire swept through London. In the inner sanctum of English science, a young physician is about to perform a blood transfusion. But what the curate is about to receive is not blood from a fellow human being but from an entirely different species-a sheep. A little blood from a good-natured and docile animal might help to cool the overheated stuff coursing through the curate鈥檚 veins and so calm his troubled brain. There are a few gasps from the spectators and then it鈥檚 all over. The curate doesn鈥檛 seem to have come to any harm. He鈥檚 having a celebratory drink and a smoke-and says he would be happy to go through it all again.
GOOD BLOOD, bad blood, hot blood or cold. If a person鈥檚 character depends on the nature and quality of their blood then it ought to be possible to improve it by drawing off some of the old and replacing it with something better.
To 17th-century medics, there was nothing odd about this idea. They felt the same way about blood as their ancient forebears had. A combination of who you were, where you lived and what you ate determined the sort of blood you had-but it could change. Disease corrupted it. Old age made it feeble. Fresh young blood, though, had the power to rejuvenate. Pharaohs bathed in it to cure them of leprosy. Even Popes believed it had healing powers. In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII was given a draught of blood taken from three young men in a vain attempt to fend off death.
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But in 1628, William Harvey discovered that blood circulates around the body in a closed system. People stopped thinking that drinking or bathing in blood would have any effect and began to think about altering the blood itself. In some of the earliest blood-changing experiments, carried out in Oxford in 1656, the young Christopher Wren made a dog drunk with an infusion of wine and beer. It was only a short step from infusion to transfusion-giving blood in place of drugs or tonics.
In February 1665, a young Oxford doctor, Richard Lower, performed the first successful transfusion-from one dog to another. When he repeated his experiment before the Royal Society a few weeks later, he caused quite a stir. 鈥淭his did give occasion to many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop and such like,鈥� wrote diarist Samuel Pepys. But there were more serious implications. 鈥淚t may, if it takes, be of mighty use to man鈥檚 health,鈥� wrote Pepys, 鈥渇or the amending of bad blood by borrowing from a better body.鈥�
In Lower鈥檚 mind, the better body needn鈥檛 be another human鈥檚, it could just as well belong to an animal. 鈥淔or there is no reason to think that the blood of other animals mixes less well with human blood than with animal blood,鈥� said Lower. He planned trials to see the effect of exchanging blood between 鈥淥ld and Young, Sick and Healthy, Hot and Cold, Fierce and Fearful, Tame and Wild Animals, and that not only of the same but of differing kinds.鈥�
The English weren鈥檛 alone in their experiments. The French were close behind. In June 1667, Jean-Baptiste Denis, a mathematician from Montpellier, performed the first human transfusion in Paris before the French equivalent of the Royal Society. The patient, a 15-year-old boy suffering from fever, was given a small amount of blood from a lamb. Like Lower, Denis wasn鈥檛 worried about mixing blood from different species. In fact, he thought the blood of beasts was healthier because animals were not prone to 鈥渄ebauchedness and irregularity in eating and drinking鈥�. The boy felt a searing heat along his arm-a sign of an immune reaction to the foreign blood. But he recovered and 鈥渘o longer showed that slowness of spirit and heaviness of body鈥� which had troubled him when he was sick.
A few days later, Denis transfused a healthy, middle-aged man who was paid for his services. He too felt a searing heat 鈥渁ll the way to his armpit鈥�, but as soon as the experiment was finished he left to spend his well-earned cash. 鈥淗e betook himself to find his comrades and carreyed them to the Tavern,鈥� wrote Denis. 鈥淎t noon finding himself more hearty (whether by the new blood he had received six hours before, or by the quantity of wine he had drank) he fell upon a sort of work so laborious to his whole body that it might almost tire a horse.鈥�
Back in London, Lower decided to try changing a man鈥檚 character by transfusion-in front of a gathering at the Royal Society. The man was 22-year-old curate Arthur Coga, whose brain was considered 鈥渁 little too warm鈥� for a clergyman. Blood from a calm and docile sheep seemed the ideal remedy. Lower drained off a small amount of Coga鈥檚 blood then connected him up to the sheep with a tube made of quills and silver pipes. Two minutes and half a pint of sheep鈥檚 blood later it was all over. Coga seemed none the worse for the experience, and returned a few days later to tell the society how he was faring. 鈥淚 was pleased to see the person who had his blood taken out,鈥� wrote Pepys. 鈥淗e finds himself much better since, and as a new man, but he is cracked a little in the head.鈥�
Lower and his contemporaries had no idea of the risks they were taking. They knew nothing about blood clotting or immunology. They had no reason to suspect the wrong sort of blood could prove fatal. Fortunately, transfusion was banned before the bodies began to pile up.
In December 1667, Denis performed another transfusion-not so much for the benefit of the patient, a manservant called Antoine Mauroy, but for his wife. The couple were newly married, but that didn鈥檛 stop Mauroy disappearing into the Paris brothels, often for days on end. Denis was asked if he could cure him of his 鈥渕adness鈥�. He thought a transfusion of blood from a calf-an animal with a suitably meek temperament-might work. The transfusion went well, and was repeated a few days later. This time, Mauroy felt a violent pain in his arm and his kidneys. His heartbeat became irregular, and he passed bloody urine, a classic reaction to foreign tissue. Mauroy recovered enough to go back to his old ways. His wife insisted on another transfusion. Denis obliged and Mauroy died the next night.
Denis was charged with murder. But during the trial it emerged that Mauroy鈥檚 wife had poisoned him and Denis was acquitted. Even so, faced with a great outcry over Denis鈥� activities, the court effectively banned transfusion. Britain and Rome followed suit and a great idea had to wait until medical science caught up with it.