“This noon I met with Mr. Hooke, and he tells me the dog which was filled with another dog’s blood, at the College the other day, is very well, and like to be so as ever, and doubts not its being found of great use to men,—and so do Dr. Whistler, who dined with us at the tavern.” (Ibid., p. 63.)
On November 28 there was further conversation at Gresham College to the same effect (ibid., p. 79). In the following year the experiments were taken a stage further, and Pepys refers again to them under the date November 21, 1667:
“Among the rest they discourse of a man that is a little frantic, that hath been a kind of minister, Dr. Wilkins saying that he hath read for him in his church, that is poor and a debauched man, that the College have hired for 20s. to have some of the blood of a sheep let into his body; and it is to be done on Saturday next. They purpose to let in about twelve ounces; which they compute, is what will be let in in a minute’s time by a watch. They differ in the opinion they have of the effects of it; some think it may have a good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood, others that it will not have any effect at all. But the man is a healthy man, and by this means will be able to give an account what alteration, if any, he do find in himself, and so may be usefull.” (Diary, vii. p. 195.)
On November 29 Pepys dined at a house of entertainment, and enjoyed good company.
“But here, above all, I was pleased to see the person who had his blood taken out. He speaks well, and did this day give the Society a relation thereof in Latin, saying that he finds himself much better since, and as a new man, but he is cracked a little in his head, though he speaks very reasonably, and very well. He had but 20s. for his suffering it, and is to have the same again tried upon him: the first sound man that ever had it tried on him in England, and but one that we hear of in France, which was a porter hired by the virtuosos.”[3] (Ibid., p. 205.)
The subject of this experiment was Arthur Coga, an indigent Bachelor of Divinity of Cambridge, aged about thirty-two. It is recorded in the Philosophical Transactions that the experiment was performed by Richard Lower and Edmund King at Arundel House on November 23, 1667, in the presence of many spectators, including several physicians. Coga, when asked why he had not the blood of some other creature transfused into him, rather than that of a sheep, replied: “Sanguis ovis symbolicam quandam facultatem habet cum sanguine Christi, quia Christus est agnus Dei.”[4] It was estimated that Coga received eight or nine ounces of blood, but he seems to have felt no effects, good or ill, and it is probable that he did not actually receive as much as this.
These beginnings in England and France led to the more frequent use of blood transfusion, but soon afterwards the operation fell into disrepute. Disasters followed the transfusions, and the practice also met with violent opposition on the ground that terrible results, such as the growth of horns, would follow the transfusion of an animal’s blood into a human being. In consequence of this they were actually forbidden in France by the Supreme Court until the Faculté of Paris should signify its approval, but the necessary permission was not given. The “extraordinary success” predicted by Sprat and the sanguine expectations of Pepys and his friends were destined not to be fulfilled until a later age.
For more than a hundred years the possibilities of blood transfusion were almost entirely neglected. There are some isolated references to it in medical writings towards the end of the eighteenth century, but of these it is only necessary to notice two. In 1792, at Eye in Suffolk, blood from two lambs was transfused by a Dr. Russell into a boy suffering from hydrophobia, and he claimed that the patient’s recovery was to be attributed to the treatment. Soon afterwards in 1796 Erasmus Darwin recommended transfusion for putrid fever, cancer of the œsophagus, and in other cases of impaired nutrition. He suggested that the blood should be transferred from donor to recipient through goose quills connected by a short length of chicken’s gut, which could be alternately allowed to fill from the donor and emptied by pressure into the patient. This operation he never actually performed.
Fig. 1.—Blundell’s Impellor
From Researches Physiological and Pathological, 1824