It may be assumed, however, that this was only an idea, and had not yet been carried into practice. It was, indeed, unlikely that any attempt to perform blood transfusion would be made until the conception of the circulation of the blood had been promulgated, and this in 1615 had not yet taken place.
William Harvey had been appointed physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1609, and already in 1616 as Lumleian lecturer had stated his theory of the circulation, but not until its publication twelve years later could it be generally known. His treatise entitled Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, which appeared in 1628, may therefore be regarded as the point from which blood transfusion first arose. It has often been stated in the literature of the subject that the first transfusion was performed in 1492, when the blood of three boys is supposed to have been transfused into the veins of the aged Pope Innocent VIII.[1] This, however, seems to have been a mis-statement of the facts. Actually a Jewish physician prepared a draught for the Pope from the blood of three boys, who were bled to death for the purpose.[2] The drinking of blood was not a new idea; this particular incident is of no special interest, and may now be allowed to sink into oblivion.
It is not until after the middle of the seventeenth century that authentic references to blood transfusion are to be found. The first is in the writings of Francesco Folli, a Florentine physician, who claims to have demonstrated the operation of transfusion of blood on August 13, 1654, to the Grand Duke Frederick II. There does not seem to be any confirmation of this in the writings of others. A few years later experimental work tending in the same direction was being done in England, and the inception of this was due to the ingenious Sir Christopher Wren, who in this connexion has not hitherto received the recognition that is his due. Dr. Wren, as he was designated at the time, was one of the most active members of the recently formed Royal Society, and was responsible for many new experiments in several sciences. It is clear from references in the Philosophical Transactions that his first experiments were done in 1659, and the following statement is made by Dr. Thomas Sprat in his History of the Royal Society, published in 1667:
“He was the first author of the Noble Anatomical Experiment of Injecting Liquors into the Veins of Animals. An Experiment now vulgarly known; but long since exhibited to the Meetings at Oxford, and thence carried by some Germans, and published abroad. By this Operation divers Creatures were immediately purg’d, vomited, intoxicated, kill’d, or reviv’d according to the quality of the Liquor injected: Hence arose many new Experiments, and chiefly that of Transfusing Blood, which the Society has prosecuted in sundry Instances, that will probably end in extraordinary Success” (p. 317).
Sir Christopher Wren did not actually carry out any transfusion experiments on his own account. This was done by his friend, Richard Lower, well known for his work on the anatomy of the heart, who worked in the laboratory of Thomas Willis at Oxford. In these experiments, some account of which was published in 1666, he used a silver cannula for obtaining continuity between the artery of one animal and the vein of another. Lower must therefore receive the credit for having done the first transfusion actually performed in England. In the following year other experiments were done by Dr. Edmund King and Thomas Cox, both of whom recorded their experiences in the Philosophical Transactions.
Meanwhile Wren’s work had become known in other countries, and it is said that transfusion was performed in 1664 by Daniel of Leipsic, who thus anticipated the work of Lower. However this may be, the first transfusion done upon a human being was certainly carried out in France by Jean Denys of Montpellier, physician to Louis XIV. This is admitted in the Philosophical Transactions, but the following statement in extenuation of English hesitancy is made:
“We readily grant, They were the first, we know off, that actually thus improved the Experiment; but then they must give us leave to inform them of this Truth, that the Philosophers in England had practised it long agoe upon Man, if they had not been so tender in hazarding the Life of Man (which they take so much pains for to preserve and relieve), nor so scrupulous to incurre the Penalties of the Law, which in England, is more strict and nice in case of this concernment, than those of many other Nations are.”
Dr. Edmund King further asserts that “We have been ready for this Experiment these six Months,” that is to say, since March, 1667. Moral precedence must, however, give way to the actual, and it is clear that Denys had snatched the laurels. A translation of a full and interesting account of his earlier experiment upon animals and his first two transfusions done upon men was published in the Philosophical Transactions for July 22, 1667. Of the first of these he wrote as follows:
“On the 15 of this Moneth, we hapned upon a Youth aged between 15 and 16 years, who had for above two moneths bin tormented with a contumacious and violent fever, which obliged his Physitians to bleed him 20 times, in order to asswage the excessive heat.
“Before this disease, he was not observed to be of a lumpish dull spirit, his memory was happy enough, and he seem’d chearful and nimble enough in body; but since the violence of his fever, his writ seem’d wholly sunk, his memory perfectly lost, and his body so heavy and drowsie that he was not fit for any thing. I beheld him fall asleep as he sate at dinner, as he was eating his Breakfast, and in all occurrences where men seem most unlikely to sleep. If he went to bed at nine of the clock in the Evening, he needed to be wakened several times before he could be got to rise by nine the next morning, and pass’d the rest of the day in an incredible stupidity.