Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [21]
The next step: animal-to-human blood transfusions. Over the following couple of years, a spate of attempts were made, though none for what we’d now consider logical or medically appropriate reasons—to treat hemorrhage, say, or to bolster red blood cells in acute anemia. The physiological unknowns at the time were considerable. Neither the component parts of blood nor its role in transporting oxygen, nutrients, hormones, and pathogens had yet been discovered. Interestingly, the idea of blood compatibility was considered, though not in the modern sense of the phrase. (Blood typing did not arise until the early 1900s.) Rather, a transfuser had to be cautious when mixing blood because it contained qualities. As perfume was the essence of a flower, so blood was a concentrate of traits, whether in man or beast. A fearless soldier had brave blood, for instance. A raging bull had angry blood. In theory, then, a transfusion had the potential to restore strength to the weak, calm to the crazy, and so on. Hence in 1667 French scientist Jean-Baptiste Denis introduced the docile blood of a calf into the circulatory system of a raving madman. But did it work? Well, Denis thought he had triumphed. The recipient had vomited profusely and urinated what looked like liquid coal—he was being purged of his lunacy! From a modern take, however, we know the man was suffering a severe transfusion reaction and was lucky to have survived. But the story didn’t end there. Before a follow-up transfusion could be performed, tragedy intervened. The man’s long-suffering wife had finally had enough and administered a lethal dose of arsenic, thus bringing both the marriage and the experiment to a close.
Emblematic representations of the four temperaments associated with each of the humors of the body. A slight excess of one humor determined whether your natural disposition was sanguine (surplus blood), choleric (yellow bile), phlegmatic (phlegm), or melancholic (black bile). Engravings by sixteenth-century German artist Virgil Solis
News of Denis’s initial “success” emboldened scientists to consider human-to-human blood transfusions. To the great minds of the seventeenth century, William Harvey included, this seemed like sound science because a belief in humoral theory was still widespread. A person in good health always had slightly more of one humor than the other three, and this excess determined the kind of person you were. Extra yellow bile made you choleric—a disagreeable sort. A tad more blood and you were sanguine—cheerful, optimistic. Remnants of this Doctrine of Temperaments, as it was known, survive to this day in the related words melancholic and phlegmatic. In an extrapolation of these factors, a German surgeon named Johann Elsholtz proposed in 1667 the use of transfusion as a remedy for marital discord. Would not the mood of a melancholic husband be lightened by transfusing him with the blood of his effusive and sanguine wife? And, flowing the other way, might not the wife become more temperate? The mutual exchange of blood between mates could heighten understanding between them—seventeenth-century couples therapy without all the talking.
Elsholtz never had the chance to move beyond the hypothetical, however. Magistrates throughout Europe could not ignore the reality that transfusions were killing people, and a ban was implemented in 1668. (In fact, it would be another 250 years before safe, effective human-to-human transfusions would be performed.) Though relegated to a minor historical footnote, Elsholtz was nevertheless on to something, I choose to believe, if only by a shiny thread of whimsy.
WITH THE POTENTIAL FOR DISEASE FACTORED OUT, TO BE INFUSED with what runs in Steve’s veins would mean being imbued with, among other qualities, his innate sanguineness and his long-lived love of comic books.