Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to Blaine and Chuck reporting,
Speaker 1: and we have a another very special October Halloween Spooky
Speaker 1: episode for you today. This time it is an interview.
Speaker 1: In fact, yes, we did something really cool recently. Last month,
Speaker 1: we went to the Decatur Book Festival right here in Georgia,
Speaker 1: and we got the chance to see Holly Tucker, who
Speaker 1: was an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, talk about her
Speaker 1: new book, which is called blood Work, A Tale of
Speaker 1: Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution. So we went
Speaker 1: into it excited about it, but thinking, Okay, this is
Speaker 1: going to be a book all about the history of
Speaker 1: blood and blood circulation and blood transfusions. But what we
Speaker 1: found was so so much more. Well. Yeah, and because
Speaker 1: Holly's interview was as part of the Atlanta Science Taverns
Speaker 1: First Science Track at the Decatur Book Festival, I had
Speaker 1: a suspicion that there would be more than just just
Speaker 1: sort of a straight medical story. And I mean there
Speaker 1: is a lot more their monsters. There's murder obviously in
Speaker 1: the title, and Um, the thing that surprised me most
Speaker 1: about the book and about Holly's lecture though, is that
Speaker 1: the history of blood transfusion starts so much earlier than
Speaker 1: you would expect. I guess that's the first Uh, maybe
Speaker 1: a little disturbing fact about the book. I mean it
Speaker 1: starts off in the six hundreds. Yeah, just to give
Speaker 1: you a brief rundown, it's about the very first blood
Speaker 1: human blood transfusion, which took place in the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and the man who performed them and how his experiments
Speaker 1: were kind of shut down, and the mystery, the murder
Speaker 1: mystery surrounding well. In this rivalry too, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of rivalries that play between France where the first
Speaker 1: transfusion took place, in England where the early your experiments
Speaker 1: in blood transfusions with animals took place, and um, just
Speaker 1: rivalry among the doctors in France too. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot going on. And then there are some really pretty
Speaker 1: horrific experiments. So I think you guys are gonna like
Speaker 1: this and like hearing about sort of a Dr Frankenstein
Speaker 1: sort of sort of medical history. Yeah, it's definitely a
Speaker 1: monster story. And Holly Tucker took us through this for
Speaker 1: about forty five minutes, and we were riveted in our chairs,
Speaker 1: and not just by the story, but by her too.
Speaker 1: She's such a cool person with a enviewable career that
Speaker 1: we will discuss more later, but first we want to
Speaker 1: start with the story. Yeah, and the first question we
Speaker 1: wanted to ask her was how did she find something
Speaker 1: like this, because, as we just mentioned, we were surprised
Speaker 1: that the history of blood transfusion started in the seventeenth century.
Speaker 1: How did Holly stumble upon this? Here's what she had
Speaker 1: to say. Well, the best thing about being a university
Speaker 1: professor is that you teach, and when it works really well. Um,
Speaker 1: and especially a place like Manderbelt often does, is that
Speaker 1: what you do in the classroom informs your research, and
Speaker 1: your research informs your teaching. UM. So, I was planning
Speaker 1: a course in my History of Medicine class I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: a segment in my History of medicine class on William
Speaker 1: Harvey's discovery of blood circulation. And it's a lecture I've
Speaker 1: been giving many many times before, and I was getting
Speaker 1: a little bit bored of it. So I decided I
Speaker 1: was always planning my class, I would do a little
Speaker 1: bit more reading around blood and um at that time,
Speaker 1: the Philosophical Transactions, which are the main um which were
Speaker 1: the main publications for the Royal Society at this time.
Speaker 1: So in the m seventeenth century they were talking a
Speaker 1: lot about blood and blood transfusion in the years following
Speaker 1: Harvey and I thought blood transfusion. I had that same
Speaker 1: response that you did, is what in the world. This
Speaker 1: is the seventeenth century. So as I was looking at
Speaker 1: this discovery of blood circulation, it led me to expand
Speaker 1: out and to stumble, quite literally stumble on blood transfusion.
Speaker 1: So it made for a really fun lecture because I
Speaker 1: was also a student. I really was still trying to
Speaker 1: find my way through the topic. And what's almost as
Speaker 1: surprising as the fact that people were doing blood transfusions
Speaker 1: this long ago, it was just learning what their previous
Speaker 1: ideas about blood were. English physician William Harvey didn't discover
Speaker 1: blood circulation and describe the circulatory system until the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and his ideas were considered pretty radical at the time.
Speaker 1: In her book, Tucker includes a good bit about the
Speaker 1: historical notions about blood, which explains, among other things, why
Speaker 1: blood letting was such a popular treatment for all sorts
Speaker 1: of illnesses at the time, and she tells us a
Speaker 1: little bit more about all of that. Here. What's really
Speaker 1: interesting about the history blood transfusion is just how unlikely
Speaker 1: it would have been for people to imagine putting blood
Speaker 1: in because they had spent so long imagining all the
Speaker 1: myriad ways to take blood out. And that was based
Speaker 1: on longstanding notions of the body as this balance of
Speaker 1: fluids and what they called They called them humors, and
Speaker 1: these were notions. The humoral way of understanding the body
Speaker 1: is something that began in antiquity with Galen Hippocrates. Those
Speaker 1: are names that many people recognize. Galen and Hippocrates understood
Speaker 1: the body to be this production of fluids, and when
Speaker 1: you were healthy, you're humors, bile, blood, black bile, and
Speaker 1: um phlegm. We're all in balance, and when you were sick,
Speaker 1: it was out of balance. And one way that you
Speaker 1: could adjust the humors was through nutrition. So if you
Speaker 1: hadn't if your body was overly cold, you would eat
Speaker 1: more warm humorlly warm food, um or. What you could
Speaker 1: do is to sort of jump start that balance would
Speaker 1: be to do blood letting, either through lancets or leeches,
Speaker 1: all the all the things that we typically associate with
Speaker 1: with early medicine, and that model had a specific um
Speaker 1: influence on how blood was understood. First, blood didn't circulate.
Speaker 1: They didn't know that blood circulated. Instead, blood was produced
Speaker 1: in the digestive system. So what you ate food, It
Speaker 1: was concocted was the word they used. Concocted in the stomach,
Speaker 1: moved to the liver where it was distilled into the
Speaker 1: life force of blood. Then the fluid blood would move
Speaker 1: up to the heart, and the heart was seen something
Speaker 1: as a furnace, so to provide heat and energy to
Speaker 1: the body, the blood would be burned off, So it
Speaker 1: made this one way trip to the heart essentially, And
Speaker 1: so they didn't know yet about the relationship between the
Speaker 1: uh pulmonary system and the cardiovascular system. So breathing was
Speaker 1: simply a way to stoke the fires of the heart
Speaker 1: and then um, when you breathe out of course, it
Speaker 1: was to get rid of some of the some of
Speaker 1: the smoke and I'm using quote fingers here, some of
Speaker 1: the smoke produced by by the heart's fires. So hearing
Speaker 1: all about the human mers and the coldness and warmness
Speaker 1: of the body and keeping all of that in balance
Speaker 1: made us wonder if that was the root of the
Speaker 1: old thing that you feed a cold and starve a fever.
Speaker 1: Here's what Hallie had to say. I think so in fact,
Speaker 1: um feeding a cold starving a fever, because what you
Speaker 1: don't want to do is, if you have a fever,
Speaker 1: if your body is already humorrally hot, is to put
Speaker 1: food in specifically hot food into your body. And that
Speaker 1: would be something like steak and wine and things like that,
Speaker 1: because your whole idea is to is to rebalance those
Speaker 1: those humors. And the same thing with with feeding a cold. Um,
Speaker 1: you would want to eat something like chicken soup where
Speaker 1: it was very warm and warming to the body as
Speaker 1: as a way to rebalance your humors. So, as I
Speaker 1: mentioned in the beginning, rivalry is really at the center
Speaker 1: of blood work, the national rivalry, the rivalry between doctors.
Speaker 1: So we wanted to know how much of that rivalry
Speaker 1: started with Harvey's discovery of circulation. Did the majority of
Speaker 1: people still go along with the old ideas of humor
Speaker 1: than of blood letting, or did they really pick up
Speaker 1: the baton with Harvey's new idea. Well, it's interesting when
Speaker 1: William Harvey discovers blood circulation in the sixteen twenties. He's
Speaker 1: specifically wondering whether this idea of the humors as being
Speaker 1: um the the definition of how blood is made, in
Speaker 1: how it is used, is whether that's actually accurate or not,
Speaker 1: And he determines, of course that it's not. Through a
Speaker 1: whole variety of experiments in sight, he finally comes to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that blood circulates, But that doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: the humors go away. Once Harvey discovers circulation. Actually, to
Speaker 1: the contrary, we know that blood letting and leeches and
Speaker 1: lancets continue well into the nineteenth century. George Washington, for example,
Speaker 1: was historians think he was pretty much blood let to
Speaker 1: death right, because the whole understanding the body is this
Speaker 1: is this humoral balance will continue. You. Now, Harvey was
Speaker 1: attractive to many of the English thinkers, but he was
Speaker 1: actually um considered too radical for the French. The French,
Speaker 1: who were Catholic, deeply deeply conservative traditional both in the
Speaker 1: religious and the political sense, but also the philosophical sense.
Speaker 1: So when Harvey presents this idea of blood circulation, the
Speaker 1: French are frankly outraged at it, and and and and
Speaker 1: so the story of blood work, of the early blood
Speaker 1: transfusions and the rivalries is set in the late sixteen sixties,
Speaker 1: but the stage itself is created in the sixteen twenties
Speaker 1: and sixteen thirties, precisely as you mentioned, with those rivalries
Speaker 1: between the French and the English around this radical theory
Speaker 1: of blood circulation. So hearing about how so many discovery
Speaker 1: and advancements were going on in the Serena in England,
Speaker 1: how is it that France is where the first blood
Speaker 1: transfusion experiments with humans of taking place. That's what we
Speaker 1: really wanted to know. How did that switch happen? And
Speaker 1: she tells us a little bit more about that here.
Speaker 1: So when William Harvey discovers blood circulation in sixteen um
Speaker 1: that will slowly start the English too ponder what this
Speaker 1: means and also want to confirm it. So men like
Speaker 1: Christopher Wren, who we associate mostly as the great architect
Speaker 1: of London, and Thomas will Willis, who we associates one
Speaker 1: of the first people to do neurological studies, they engage
Speaker 1: Harvey's idea of blood circulation as a way to um
Speaker 1: see how how blood moves to the body and specifically
Speaker 1: how it moves to the brain and doesn't move into
Speaker 1: the brain, and so they're able to confirm Harvey's theory
Speaker 1: and it's nothing but a theory at this point by
Speaker 1: doing infusion studies. So they begin injecting animals, in particular
Speaker 1: with any birth fluids, right, um, beer, wine, opium. And
Speaker 1: the thought is is if Harvey is right and blood
Speaker 1: makes this one way trip to the heart, is that
Speaker 1: these drugs in an animal system won't have a lasting
Speaker 1: effect because they'll be burned off immediately. But they start
Speaker 1: to see that their animals are dying, they're sick, they're drunk.
Speaker 1: So Harvey must have been onto something. Now the French
Speaker 1: are watching with a bit of disgust, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's what the English are doing. Um. The English
Speaker 1: um tend to be pretty radical. They're also fighting it
Speaker 1: out on the battlefield. The French and the English have
Speaker 1: experienced a long history of animosities and rivalries, so it
Speaker 1: doesn't make a lot of sense. You're absolutely right that
Speaker 1: the first human blood transfusion would be done in France
Speaker 1: because they're so resistant. Well, what happens is that the
Speaker 1: English start to move from circulation to infusion to transfusion,
Speaker 1: because it makes sense if they finally started to think
Speaker 1: about putting things into animals blood systems. Of course, maybe
Speaker 1: what they want to do is to test it out
Speaker 1: by transfusing the blood of one animal into another. And
Speaker 1: that catches the attention of a man named Jean Baptiste Any,
Speaker 1: a Frenchman who was not part of that French elite
Speaker 1: that is so hostile to Harvey's theories of blood circulation
Speaker 1: and also to the English more generally, because he wasn't
Speaker 1: trained in Paris. Paris is the seat of traditional thinking.
Speaker 1: It's this it's the place where all of the best
Speaker 1: doctors go to train, and that training at the University
Speaker 1: of Paris Medical School is a traditional training that is
Speaker 1: built around Galen and Hippocrates. There's no room for any
Speaker 1: thinking outside of that. But Denny was trained at the
Speaker 1: rival school in the south of France in Montpellier, which
Speaker 1: attracted more Protestants, and that also was more open to
Speaker 1: um a coming, more open to Paracelsus, who was one
Speaker 1: of the great alchemists, and more adventurous in a way.
Speaker 1: So Denny learns of the English transfusion experiments and he
Speaker 1: is now in Paris and wants desperately to make a
Speaker 1: name for himself, and as someone who is not noble born,
Speaker 1: he's actually from a very um modest family who was
Speaker 1: not trained in Paris. The best way for him to
Speaker 1: make a name for himself is to do what any
Speaker 1: two year old would do, is to throw temper tantrum
Speaker 1: and do that very thing that the that the parents
Speaker 1: don't want the child to do, which is to engage
Speaker 1: in one of the most distasteful types of experiments, and
Speaker 1: that would be the blood transfusion experiments. And that's he
Speaker 1: ends up replicating all of the English uh transfusion, animal
Speaker 1: transfusion experiments and then um, just as the English we're
Speaker 1: getting ready to perform their first human experiments, Deny scoops
Speaker 1: them essentially does his own. So. Holly Tucker's book contains
Speaker 1: a lot of details that pertain to class or status,
Speaker 1: especially regarding its primary protagonist, Jean Peptiste de ni Now
Speaker 1: we're talking. She includes details like people's clothing, their education, um,
Speaker 1: the most minute things you wouldn't even think about, the
Speaker 1: curtains on their carriage exactly. So we wanted to know
Speaker 1: from her what role did class play in the story
Speaker 1: about science and here's what she had to say. Oh, classes,
Speaker 1: As you mentioned, everywhere, UM, one's ability to move through
Speaker 1: society UM depended on both your money and your status.
Speaker 1: In early France, we're at a moment particularly as well,
Speaker 1: when Louis the fourteenth, the great son king who created Versailles,
Speaker 1: of course, is in the process of strengthening his monarchy.
Speaker 1: This he's doing this largely and in response to what
Speaker 1: had been a horrific moment in France following the religious
Speaker 1: wars between the Catholics and the Protestants UM in the
Speaker 1: late sixteenth century. France also saw civil wars in the
Speaker 1: early seventeenth century. So Louis the fourteenth comes in as
Speaker 1: monarch and really wants to consolidate the power. And the
Speaker 1: best way to consolidate power, right is to reaffies to
Speaker 1: strengthen class structures. So he moves all of the nobles
Speaker 1: out of Versailles where he can keep an eye on
Speaker 1: them so they won't want to weaken the monarchy. And
Speaker 1: the best way to keep an eye on them is
Speaker 1: to UM create these rituals all around the king and
Speaker 1: the king's body, so that the mont the nobility. At
Speaker 1: this point, they're really fighting for each other, fighting for
Speaker 1: the right one to be recognized in society and to
Speaker 1: to be able to to be frank, to be able
Speaker 1: to hold the king's um chamber pot So, so you know,
Speaker 1: in this context the early beginnings of modern science UM
Speaker 1: are beginning to form. Louis the fourteenth also, um is
Speaker 1: uncomfortable with the idea that science, up until his reign,
Speaker 1: had been localized primarily in private academies. So Deni's work
Speaker 1: is actually financed by a very wealthy nobleman who four
Speaker 1: years had attracted sciences brightest luminaries, Christian Huygens, who discovered rings,
Speaker 1: the rings around Saturn. He just he announced that discovery
Speaker 1: in um moment was his name, Mamo's academy. UM. Mama
Speaker 1: tried to um recruit Renee dick Hart into his academy
Speaker 1: and ended up settling for Decartes's rival, Pierre Gassondie. So
Speaker 1: what happens right as as Denis is doing these blood transfusions,
Speaker 1: he is getting supported by a man whose private academ
Speaker 1: me had essentially been gutted by Louis the Fourteenth's decision
Speaker 1: to move science into the state and to create the
Speaker 1: French Academy of sciences. So there are, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: there are so many cultural and economic restraints on science
Speaker 1: that Denis is really um renegade in many many ways
Speaker 1: because he is budding against the the tide, if you will,
Speaker 1: the political tides of the time. So I found the
Speaker 1: figure of more More the Nobleman to be a really
Speaker 1: fascinating part of the book, especially the limits that he
Speaker 1: went to to try to establish, re establish his prestigious
Speaker 1: the head of a private academy, going against going up
Speaker 1: against the Sun King himself. And it's not as though
Speaker 1: he's subtle about it either. Some of these blood experiments
Speaker 1: are taking place in his own home in the center
Speaker 1: of Paris. So we want to to hear from Holly
Speaker 1: about where these other transfusions were happening all over the city,
Speaker 1: who was observing them, and just what they were like.
Speaker 1: I mean, what the nitty gritty of a seventeenth century
Speaker 1: blood transfusion was really like. And here's what she had
Speaker 1: to say. Um, most of these experiments from Harvey well
Speaker 1: into the English experiments in the Royal Society, and then
Speaker 1: of course Denise legendary and uh ill fated experiments on humans.
Speaker 1: They're being done in private homes and uh I can't help.
Speaker 1: But each time I go to Paris for people who
Speaker 1: are in Paris. And if you stand in front of
Speaker 1: the fountain at uh Sammy shed and you look down
Speaker 1: the Sin towards the Louver on the left bank, there
Speaker 1: are a few big buildings, Denny would have done those
Speaker 1: in one of those buildings he would have also he
Speaker 1: we know he did. He did very public experiments on
Speaker 1: the banks of the Sin. So if you ever have
Speaker 1: a chance to walk along the river in Paris, you
Speaker 1: can imagine these well attended animal to animals, specifically dog
Speaker 1: to dog experiments on the bank of the Scent, because
Speaker 1: he moved it out of his own home into the
Speaker 1: public realm as a way to get attention. Now as
Speaker 1: the English are doing many of these in their own homes,
Speaker 1: and Denia is doing this in his um, his residence
Speaker 1: as well, on the bank of the banks of the Sin.
Speaker 1: Louis the fourteenth creates the Academy of Sciences at the
Speaker 1: very same time and then commissions his natural philosophers as
Speaker 1: scientists were called to perform replications of the English experiments
Speaker 1: in his library on the on the right bank, and
Speaker 1: so there is one of the first times that we
Speaker 1: see scientific experiments being done not just in a royal
Speaker 1: context but in the king's own library, and the tools
Speaker 1: that they were using, as you can imagine, we're really
Speaker 1: quite rudimentary to do these experiment mints. All you would
Speaker 1: really need, and for the moment we can talk about
Speaker 1: the the animal experiments, all you would really need is
Speaker 1: a big table onto which you could strap the animals
Speaker 1: and a blood letting bowl for each of the animals,
Speaker 1: and then some form of tubing. And the tubing was
Speaker 1: again rudimentary. In the English experiments, they were using goose quills, right,
Speaker 1: so they would slip a goose quill into the vein
Speaker 1: or the artery of an animal, slip another goose quill
Speaker 1: into the vein an artery of of of the donor
Speaker 1: of the recipient, and then link those two together. The
Speaker 1: English began creating metal tubes um and the and the
Speaker 1: French decided they wanted to trump them, and they actually
Speaker 1: did a double intake tube in the Academy of French
Speaker 1: Academy of Sciences, where they could do transfusions that were simultaneous,
Speaker 1: so uh the dog would be a recipient and a
Speaker 1: donor at the same time. So in theory. The blood
Speaker 1: would be flowing in two ways, um through the different
Speaker 1: through the two tubes of the animals, so they were
Speaker 1: really quite simplistic. You also needed a fireplace because you
Speaker 1: wanted to keep the animals warm um and also keep
Speaker 1: the blood warm so would continue flowing because blood clouding,
Speaker 1: of course, was a huge problem in these experiments. Another
Speaker 1: interesting aspect of the story is that Denny didn't just
Speaker 1: perform one blood transfusion that caused all this controversy. He
Speaker 1: had three very different subjects, which are sort of interesting
Speaker 1: case studies in their own right. Tucker talks about them
Speaker 1: a little bit more here. Denny did three experiments in
Speaker 1: the end. The first was with a young boy who
Speaker 1: had been feverish for about a month, and we're not
Speaker 1: clear on how he found out about this boy. We're
Speaker 1: also not clear on how he got the mother to
Speaker 1: agree to let him perform a transfusion on her son.
Speaker 1: But one thing we are sure of is that Denny
Speaker 1: um transfused Lamb's blood into the boy's arteries. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: to the boy's veins, and the boy did fine. He
Speaker 1: didn't die. And that was the main criterion for success, right,
Speaker 1: is whether there was death or not. Now the fever
Speaker 1: was reduced, the boy was still very tired. Afterwards. We
Speaker 1: suspect that there was a blood transfusion of blood in
Speaker 1: compatibility reaction, but nothing huge. And people always ask, how
Speaker 1: is it that someone could survive this? How could this
Speaker 1: young boys survive this? There are three criteria for um
Speaker 1: hemolytic reactions, so blood transfusion and compatibility reactions. The first
Speaker 1: is how fast the blood goes in, And they're using
Speaker 1: very again, rudimentary tools, so the blood is likely not
Speaker 1: moving very fast because it's also clotting. So first, how
Speaker 1: fast the blood moves in how much again not very
Speaker 1: fast because it's clotting, not very much because it's clotting.
Speaker 1: And then the third criteria is criterion is whether there's
Speaker 1: been previous exposure. Of course, the boy had no previous
Speaker 1: exposure to Lamb's blood, so it didn't move fast. There
Speaker 1: wasn't a lot, and there had been no previous exposure.
Speaker 1: And when you talk to um immunologists, they'll tell you
Speaker 1: that the human body can really take a lot of
Speaker 1: insult um. And there's no surprise among the physicians that
Speaker 1: I consulted for this book that the boy could have
Speaker 1: survived this. Now the second one is interesting because it's
Speaker 1: here there is absolutely no therapeutic interest. It's purely experimental.
Speaker 1: Is Deny Then, for the second transfusion, moves to a
Speaker 1: butcher and I can't be sure, but I think the
Speaker 1: butcher was the same butcher provided the sheep for the
Speaker 1: first one, because the butcher in the first experiment was
Speaker 1: really lively, very funny, gregarious um, and the butcher in
Speaker 1: the second experiment um is the same um, same attitude.
Speaker 1: In fact, after the blood transfusion, and of course the
Speaker 1: sheep is is dead, he goes, hey, what are you
Speaker 1: gonna do with that? You can I take it home, Um,
Speaker 1: either to sell it or to eat it. And Denis says, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: sure we know that. In the second case, is that
Speaker 1: the butcher was paid because Denny, after the experiment, is
Speaker 1: feeling pretty good about himself, is walking through the streets
Speaker 1: of his neighborhood and looks into a tavern. For some
Speaker 1: reason catches his eye and he sees his butcher that
Speaker 1: he just transfused, drunk as a skunk, and storms the
Speaker 1: tavern to yell at his patients, saying, what are you
Speaker 1: doing well? The the gregarious Butcher throws his arms around
Speaker 1: Denny and says, look at me, I'm feeling great. And
Speaker 1: the Butcher's friends, I'll say, hey, you know, give me
Speaker 1: one of these transfusions, give me some money. And so
Speaker 1: he now has not only not killed his patients, but
Speaker 1: he's creating the name for himself that he desperately wants
Speaker 1: to have, and he has patients ready willing and lined
Speaker 1: up the third transfusion. Interestingly, he doesn't reach for any
Speaker 1: of those volunteers. But with the nobleman Beaumour, who was
Speaker 1: financing his experiments, they decided that the next step then
Speaker 1: would be to take the most famous man in Paris.
Speaker 1: In fact, the most notoriously famous man in Paris, um
Speaker 1: man named Antoine Moroix, who ran the streets regularly naked, delirious.
Speaker 1: Um He was considered the madman of the most elite
Speaker 1: neighborhood of Paris. And they pluck him off of the streets,
Speaker 1: of course, against his will, tie him up, and transfuse
Speaker 1: him with interestingly, not lambs blood this time, but uh,
Speaker 1: cow blood, and the first transfusion goes pretty well. Um
Speaker 1: Maroi is calmed. Now it was likely he was just
Speaker 1: very sick, but he's calmed down. They decided to try
Speaker 1: a second one. He's even more calm likely even more
Speaker 1: sick um, and they end up sending him home to
Speaker 1: this hovel of village shock that he lives in, back
Speaker 1: to his wife and uh. Later a few months later,
Speaker 1: the wife comes storming to denise door and says, my
Speaker 1: husband's at it again. He is delusional, he's going crazy.
Speaker 1: You need to transfuse him with with blood again. And Denny,
Speaker 1: of course, esus is a wonderful opportunity to try it again.
Speaker 1: He goes out to the village, begins to transfusion um mahroa,
Speaker 1: begins having seizures. It's not clear whether and how much
Speaker 1: blood may have been transfused, and the next day the
Speaker 1: man is dead and Denise will later be called up
Speaker 1: on murder charges. So this is where the mystery really begins,
Speaker 1: the one that Holly is trying to solve throughout the
Speaker 1: course of this book. The madman has been murdered. But
Speaker 1: why what were the motives behind this crime? We didn't
Speaker 1: want to give away the who done it aspect of it,
Speaker 1: because why would you want to read the book if
Speaker 1: we did that? But we did want to get a
Speaker 1: little bit more into who might have done it, And
Speaker 1: here's what she had to say, Well, the motives actually
Speaker 1: go back to a question that I know a lot
Speaker 1: of people ask when they hear the story, is why
Speaker 1: in the world were they're using animal blood? Right? And
Speaker 1: that is actually at the heart of the murder charges essentially,
Speaker 1: and the and the outcome of this. For transfusionists like
Speaker 1: Denny and for many of the transfusionists in England, it
Speaker 1: made perfect sense because animal flesh and fluid had long
Speaker 1: been used for therapeutics. So if I going back to
Speaker 1: the humors, if I was feeling overly, overly cold as
Speaker 1: far as you know, being very flummy in the humoral sense,
Speaker 1: I might reach for a raw steak, big glass of
Speaker 1: wine um to be able to bolster my system. The
Speaker 1: same thing with fruits and vegetables. It's very It's very
Speaker 1: interesting is that all different types of conception manuals um
Speaker 1: will tell you that if you want to have a
Speaker 1: baby boy, baby boys are men are considered humorally to
Speaker 1: be hot. What you would do is is reach for
Speaker 1: things like staged testicles and you would dry them and
Speaker 1: powder them and sprinkle them on your food as a
Speaker 1: way to bolster your humorl system is to make your
Speaker 1: body hotter so than when it came time to conceive,
Speaker 1: and be more likely to conceive a boy. So animals
Speaker 1: had long been used as as medicine essentially. And there's
Speaker 1: a second element is that there's a man named Rene Descartes,
Speaker 1: a philosopher in the sixteen thirties. Of course he's famous
Speaker 1: to us now, because all we have to do is
Speaker 1: say Descartes, I think therefore I am de cart put forth.
Speaker 1: A radical theory is that animal bodies and human bodies
Speaker 1: are identical. They function more or less like machines. The
Speaker 1: only difference between animals, to decart the only difference between
Speaker 1: animal and human bodies is that humans can speak, they
Speaker 1: can reason, and they have souls. And Descartes says, all
Speaker 1: of those attributes that make as human actually are not
Speaker 1: lodged at all in the body. Now, it was highly contested.
Speaker 1: Descartes spent much of his life in Holland in exile
Speaker 1: because his theories of blood circulation was a radical theory.
Speaker 1: So was descartes idea. So it was thought that if
Speaker 1: de cart is right, then transfusing animal blood into humans
Speaker 1: would be little more than changing the oil in a car. Right,
Speaker 1: But the fear is what if de cart is wrong?
Speaker 1: What if there's something in animal blood that is specifically animal,
Speaker 1: and what if animals have souls? What if all of
Speaker 1: that is in this red fluid and we're now moving
Speaker 1: into humans. Could humans begin taking on animal attributes and
Speaker 1: then vice versa. If we start to move human blood
Speaker 1: into animals, could science now have the means to create
Speaker 1: through blood transfusion, through blood transfere could it? Could it
Speaker 1: create hybrid species? Monster ers? That was a frightening proposition, right,
Speaker 1: It seems ridiculous to us, but at the time the
Speaker 1: greatest thinkers were terrified of that prospect, and Dennie needed
Speaker 1: to be stopped. So at the heart of um the
Speaker 1: Murder Trial is that there was a plot essentially um
Speaker 1: as I, as I uncover in the book. Deni was
Speaker 1: acquitted of murder, but it was clear that the patient
Speaker 1: had been murdered by Arsenic with the help of three physicians,
Speaker 1: and so I spent a lot of time trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what in the world that would mean. And
Speaker 1: sure enough, with a speculation that possibly this, this fear
Speaker 1: of hybrid species was underlying it all, and sure enough
Speaker 1: once I was able to uncover the the murderers. It's
Speaker 1: it's glaring is that they set Dennie up as a
Speaker 1: way to to save the human species. It's a noble cause,
Speaker 1: isn't it. So finally, when we were kind of wrapping
Speaker 1: up our interview, we're gonna have a part two as well,
Speaker 1: by the way, But when we were wrapping up our interview,
Speaker 1: we told Holly that one of these episodes would be
Speaker 1: the culmination of our October Halloween series, because, after all,
Speaker 1: blood and monsters pretty great combo. And she was amused
Speaker 1: by that, unfortunately, and offered one last take on this
Speaker 1: tale of medicine and murder, which we thought was really fun.
Speaker 1: I think we have a tendency to look at look
Speaker 1: at scientists both as being very important in making all
Speaker 1: these great breakthroughs, but there's always this deep fear that
Speaker 1: underlying underlying all science and then the hearts of scientists
Speaker 1: is this deep you know, Dr Jekyl Frankenstein element, which
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think it's true, but Jean Baptiste
Speaker 1: den essentially represents that as well as he's he's questing
Speaker 1: for the greatest answers of of nature. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, could he be um ruining the human species?
Speaker 1: Um So he's some thing of an early example of
Speaker 1: Dr Frankenstein, if you will. So there you have at Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: It doesn't get anymore HALLOWEENI than that. And Dr Chucklin Mr.
Speaker 1: Hyde a pretty great spooky combo. So it was really
Speaker 1: fun to talk to Holly about the book and the
Speaker 1: story behind the book, but we also wanted to hear
Speaker 1: some about how she went about researching it, how she
Speaker 1: went about solving that cold case. And we're saving that
Speaker 1: part for a second half of this interview, so you
Speaker 1: can tune in and a couple of weeks maybe and
Speaker 1: check out that. And it's just exciting as the other stuff,
Speaker 1: if not more. It really is. It is like Super
Speaker 1: Adventures and the Archives essentially, with a little bit of
Speaker 1: frustration in there too. But we hope we've given you
Speaker 1: a little bit about Blood to go on in case
Speaker 1: you're planning your Halloween costume for this here and blood
Speaker 1: is a part of it. I mean, if you go
Speaker 1: out and pick up the book in time, you might
Speaker 1: even be able to incorporate some of the details from
Speaker 1: it and your costume. Maybe you'll go as William Harvey
Speaker 1: buy some goose quills, yes, but we wouldn't recommend trying
Speaker 1: any of these experiments at home, although they might have
Speaker 1: done that in the seventeenth century. But if you do
Speaker 1: get a chance to pick up the book, we'd like to,
Speaker 1: As we did with the McCulla book recently, we'd like
Speaker 1: to start a little discussion of it. Please hit us
Speaker 1: up on social media. We're on Facebook or on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Miston History, or you can always email us at
Speaker 1: History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We'd love
Speaker 1: to get a little discussion going about what you like
Speaker 1: about the book, um, what was surprising to you, or
Speaker 1: if there's anything else you just want to know about
Speaker 1: blood or blood circulation or blood transfusions. Please write to
Speaker 1: us and we will try to find the answers for you,
Speaker 1: but they may be answered in the next episode, so
Speaker 1: you might went away, so stay tuned and UM. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, you can go and check out medical type
Speaker 1: topics on our own website at www dot how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Be sure to check out our new
Speaker 1: video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how stu Work
Speaker 1: staff off as we explore the most promising and perplexing
Speaker 1: possibilities of tomorrow. The House of Works iPhone app has
Speaker 1: a ride. Download it today on iTunes, M