On December 14, 1799, America’s first president awoke with a sore throat, which was soon accompanied by a fever. At six that morning, George Washington’s doctors agreed it was time for a bloodletting. Eighteen ounces of blood later, the patient’s condition had not improved, and he was bled twice more. Not long after, Washington was unable to breathe—medical historians believe that he suffered from an infection of the epiglottis—and a tracheotomy was performed. A fourth round of bloodletting followed, to no avail. Washington gasped for breath like a drowning man and died late that evening, around ten o’clock.
Though we will never know whether Washington died of his illness or of the severe bloodletting he suffered during his “treatment,” many historians would bet on the latter. His body was laid out in the family’s formal parlor so that prominent visitors could pay their respects. Yet as the nation prepared to mourn its first president, others wondered if there was a way to bring him back to life.
When Washington’s granddaughter, Mrs. Thomas Law, arrived the next morning, she brought with her a man who suggested the unthinkable. Dr. William Thornton, best known as architect of the U.S. Capitol, speculated that the president could be revived if both blood and air were returned to his corpse. Dr. Thornton suggested that Washington be warmed up “by degrees and by friction” so his blood might be coaxed to move once again through his body. Then Thornton proposed to “open a passage to the lungs by the trachea, and to inflate them with air, to produce artificial respiration, and to transfuse blood into him from a lamb.”
Thornton’s idea of transfusing the dead president was swiftly rejected by Washington’s family. They did not quibble with the doctor as to whether resurrection by transfusion could be possible. Instead they declined on the grounds that it was better to leave the memory of George Washington’s legacy intact as “one who had departed full of honor and renown; free from the frailties of age, in full enjoyment of every faculty, and prepared for eternity.” Death was preferable to any extraordinary attempt to resurrect the president using animal blood.
Thornton was not the first to propose blood transfusion as a miraculous cure, nor was he the first to consider animals as donors. More than 130 years earlier, between 1665 and 1668, all of Europe was abuzz with excitement over the possibility of blood transfusion. French and English scientists were locked in an intense battle to master blood’s secrets and to perform the first successful transfusion in humans. Members of the British Royal Society began by injecting any number of fluids into the veins of animals: wine, beer, opium, milk, and mercury. Then they turned their sights on transfusions between dogs—large ones to small ones, old ones to young ones, one breed to another. The French Academy of Science followed suit with its own canine transfusion experiments but to its dismay was unable to replicate English successes.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a young physician named Jean-Baptiste Denis surprised the scientific world when he performed the first animal-to-human blood transfusion to great acclaim—and even greater controversy. On a cold day in December 1667, Denis transfused lamb’s blood into the veins of a fifteen-year-old boy. The result was stunning: The boy survived. But fate would not be kind to Denis for long. Flushed with success, Denis tried his next, and last, round of transfusions—this time on a mentally ill, thirty-four-year-old man named Antoine Mauroy. The doctor cut open the vein of a calf and rigged a rudimentary system of goose quills tied together with string. He then transfused just over ten ounces of calf’s blood into Mauroy’s arm. By the next morning signs looked promising that the experiment was going to work—or, at the very least, not be fatal. Several days and several transfusions later, however, Mauroy was dead. And Denis was soon accused of murder.
In a dramatic turn of events, a Paris judge cleared Denis of all accusations on April 17, 1668. Still, the madman’s death signaled an end not only to Denis’ career as a transfusionist but also to transfusion entirely. In its judgment the French court mandated that no future human transfusion could be performed without prior authorization from the Paris Faculty of Medicine. And this was very unlikely to happen, given that the medical school had made no secret of its hostility toward the procedure. Two years later, in 1670, the French parliament banned transfusions altogether; transfusion experiments were also stopped in England, Italy, and throughout Europe, not to be taken up again for 150 years.
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This book views the story of the Denis trial through two different lenses. First, it is a microhistory that traces the little-known and captivating tale of the rise and fall of the transfusionist Denis, and blood transfusion more generally, over a period of about five years during the seventeenth century. But, perhaps more important, it is also a macrohistory that traces the confluence of ideas, discoveries, and cultural, political, and religious forces that made blood transfusion even thinkable in this era before anesthesia, antisepsis, and knowledge of blood groups. This story is, then, as much about the scientific revolution—its greatest minds and most calculating monarchs—as it is about blood transfusion itself.
~~Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder -by- Holly Tucker
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