Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [44]
Tied to a chair, Mauroy was first bled (presumably to eliminate bad blood while freeing up a little space). Then he received about six ounces of calf’s blood, which was introduced through a metal tube. Mauroy complained about some initial burning in his arm but otherwise showed no serious effects. After a short nap, the patient began singing and whistling—which many of the onlookers who had gathered to watch the procedure actually preferred to getting beaten up by Mauroy or having him torch their houses.
Two days later, encouraged by the results, Dr. Denis injected even more calf blood into Mauroy, but this time the results were quite a bit more dramatic. Reportedly, the patient began sweating, and soon after, he complained of severe pain in his lower back (near his kidneys, claimed Denis). Nearly choking to death, Mauroy vomited his lunch and soon after began urinating gobs of black fluid.
Today, physicians would have immediately recognized that Mauroy had suffered a serious reaction because of the extreme incompatibility of the nonhuman blood he had received. The unfortunate man’s immune system had in fact mounted a multi-pronged attack against the foreign blood and the results had nearly killed him. This being 1667, however, the interpretation was somewhat different. To Dr. Denis, surely the vomiting and coal-colored liquid Mauroy continued to urinate for days were proof that the man’s madness had been eliminated. After all, the feverish and bedridden patient wasn’t nearly as manic as he’d been previously—in fact, he wasn’t speaking or moving much at all.*64
Several months later, any enthusiasm over the potential benefits of blood transfusion was shattered when one of Denis’ patients died. The English, who believed that Denis had not only stolen their transfusion techniques but also their limelight, went out of their way to discredit the Frenchman—as did some of his own rival countrymen. Denis tried to defend himself, but the roof fell in when his highest-profile patient, Antoine Mauroy, also died. After a brief respite, the man had reportedly resumed his wild and brutal ways, and this (as it was later discovered) prompted his wife to employ a bit of creative chemistry. Madame Mauroy began adding arsenic to her husband’s diet, but for some reason she failed to mention this fact when she and her husband approached Dr. Denis, asking him to perform a third transfusion. Shaken by his former patient’s appearance, Denis declined, but when Mauroy dropped dead several days later, the physician found himself charged with murder. Denis was eventually exonerated, but the uproar surrounding the case (as well as transfusion-related deaths elsewhere) sounded the death knell for human blood transfusions and any related experiments. Two years later, the procedure was banned in France and soon after in England. Additionally, a pair of transfusion-related fatalities in Italy led to a denouncement of the procedure by the pope. Public outcry, capped with a papal denouncement, resulted in a silence that would last for the next 150 years.*65
In 1818 gynecologist James Blundell, in an attempt to reduce the large number of deaths associated with postpartum hemorrhaging, performed what is considered to be the first human-to-human transfusion. He withdrew blood from a donor and injected it into a blood vessel in the arm of the donor’s wife. From his earlier work on animals, Blundell recognized the importance of eliminating air from the syringe before injecting the blood and also the necessity of performing the transfusion quickly, before the blood had a chance to clot. Survival was a hit or miss affair, and Blundell’s first four patients died, not only because they were in a weakened state already but because the well-meaning physician had no knowledge of blood typing or modern anticlotting agents (like heparin). The use of crude, nonsterilized tools only added to the problem.
In 1901, Dr. Carl Landsteiner, an Austrian pathologist, revolutionized the ground rules for blood transfusion after discovering the ABO blood groups.