Blood Work (17 page)

Shortly before eleven o'clock one brisk morning in late November 1667, Edmund King arrived at Lower's laboratory near Arundel House. News of the scheduled experiment had traveled through the society, and the surgeon was forced to push his way through a thicket of more than forty spectators who had come to observe the transfusion. The lengthy guest list included several physicians, members of Parliament, and even a bishop. Before these witnesses King and Lower began by opening the artery of a sheep. They placed a small pan to catch the blood that flowed out of the animal while they worked to insert a narrow silver tube into the blood vessel. They let dark red liquid from the animal's artery flow into a dish and measured it; from this the surgeons calculated a flow rate of about twelve ounces of blood per minute. Then they swiftly capped the tube with a silver stopper. Some blood continued to seep from the wound, but for the most part,
the stopper mechanism kept the lamb's blood where it needed to be for now: in the beast.

Next they turned to Coga, who was admiring the “florid arterial blood” resting in the porringer. Mesmerized, the man dipped a knife into the pan and brought it to his mouth. He liked what he tasted. Finding it “of good relish,” Coga stretched his arm eagerly toward Lower and King.
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The surgeons used a fine-bladed lancet to open one of the man's veins. They let about seven ounces of blood, making room for the quantity of lamb's blood with which they intended to replace it. One of the surgeons gripped Coga's arm just below the incision to reduce blood flow until the other could slip another small stoppered tube upward into the vein. Nodding to each other, they removed the stopper from each of the tubes in unison and linked them with a series of thin quills. The room fell silent as all eyes moved quickly from beast to quills to man and back. Nearly a full minute had passed, and there was no sign that any blood was moving out of the lamb's artery and into the quills. Lower and King began to worry that blood was clotting in the stoppered tube. They waited anxiously, hoping that the blood would begin to flow. Without warning and to the surgeons' great relief, it did. The red fluid pushed its way through the quills and “ran freely into the Man's vein for the space of two minutes at least.” They removed the quills from the tube in the lamb's artery and disconnected the tube from their patient's arm.

By every description Coga made “not the least complaint” during the procedure. The experimenters asked the man several times how he was feeling. In Denis' experiments both the boy and the butcher had complained of heat at the transfusion site. Coga showed no such signs, to the smug satisfaction of Lower and King. King speculated that, during the nervous moments as they waited for the blood to begin flowing through the quills,
the fluid had cooled and “come in a temper very agreeable to venal blood.” To assure spectators that blood had indeed moved from the animal and into Coga, they did not replace the stopper. Instead they bled the sheep dry in a “very free stream.” King collected some of the blood and made a few quick calculations. Their experiences showed that donor blood flowed more slowly in the second minute of a transfusion than it did in the first; they had also bled about seven ounces of blood from the man before initiating the transfusions. Taking these variables into account, King estimated that they had infused about ten or eleven ounces of sheep's blood into Coga.

When it was all over the spectators fawned over Coga, who looked “well and merry.” He was an extrovert who loved attention almost as much as he loved a stiff drink. While King stitched him up, he enjoyed a glass of wormwood wine and regaled the crowd with stories in Latin, English, and at times an incomprehensible mix of both. A second glass of wine and a pipeful of good tobacco later, Coga answered a slew of questions about being the first Englishman to have veins full of animal blood. When asked why he was happy with the choice of lamb's blood, the playful Coga smiled and replied without missing a beat:
Sanguis ovis symbolicam quamdam facultatem habet cum sanguine Christi; quia Chistus est agnus Dei
(The blood of sheep has some symbolic association with the blood of Christ, because Christ is the lamb of God). The room erupted in boisterous tavernlike laughter, which transformed into cheers after King checked the man's pulse and announced with pride that it was much “stronger and fuller” than before the transfusion.
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England's sacrificial “lamb” had survived and even thrived.

Coga returned home a few hours later. His appetite was good and—an important detail for early medical diagnoses, which
emphasized urine and excreta—the man had “three or four stools as he used to have before.”
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But by early evening, the high of the transfusion had given way to fatigue that went beyond what Coga's caregivers said was normal for him following a simple bloodletting. He crawled into his bed and slept well, despite an uncontrollable and profuse sweating that lasted for several hours, no doubt the result of a mild reaction following the transfusion of incompatible blood. The next morning Henry Oldenburg and John Wilkins went to the man's home to check on his progress. Coga was awake but was still lounging in bed. The secretary of the Royal Society marveled that Coga, who had once been “lookt upon as a very freakish and extravagant man,” seemed very composed and more like the well-educated person that he was.
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Immediately following the procedure Coga had begged King and Lower to repeat the experiment on him in a few days. They demurred, deciding instead to take a bit more time to review the results of the first trial. Now in the company of Oldenburg, Coga wanted it recorded that he stood ready to serve as a volunteer for another transfusion—provided, of course, that he could expect another payment and some more wormwood wine.

The advantage of using Coga was that he was an educated man. Despite his tendency to disordered ravings, the Royal Society fellows felt sure that he was competent enough to give an accurate account of “what alteration, if any, he doth find in himself, and so may be useful.” A week after his initial transfusion, Coga returned to the Royal Society and was put on show for the fellows. Pepys marveled at the man's condition. “He speaks well,” the diarist wrote later that evening, “and did this day give the Society a relation of it in Latin, saying that he finds himself much better since.” Coga may have felt like a “new man,” but Pepys still wondered about the patient's mental state: “He is cracked a little in his head, though he speaks very reasonably and very well.”
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Oldenburg was euphoric. There was now no doubt that the English had demonstrated their dominance in the blood race. He announced it with pride in letters to the Continent. Oldenburg's need to restore his own reputation—and that of the English more generally—following the Denis fiasco was never far from the surface. His letter to René-François de Sluse, a French-speaking philosopher in Liège, amply demonstrated this. “I cannot conceal from you,” wrote Oldenburg, “that our Society has so far succeeded with that experiment of transfusing blood from one animal into another (which they had previously attempted with good fortune on beasts a good many months ago, and which the French have successfully imitated) and that, a few days ago, they performed it upon a man, not without good results.” Oldenburg remained optimistic as well that transfusion would prove “most beneficial to humanity, because of the large losses of blood incurred in blood-letting, as in the treatment of frenzy and many other diseases” and promised that he would keep his correspondents abreast of “its further fortunes” in England.
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It would not be long before Oldenburg had more news about English successes. The society indulged Coga's requests for another transfusion on December 12, 1667, again paying him twenty shillings for his trouble. Another noisy and excited crowd congregated at Arundel House. Using the same procedure as before, King bled what he guessed was about eight ounces of blood from Coga and replaced it with what he announced was about fourteen ounces of sheep's blood.
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Many in the crowd shouted that they did not believe that such a great quantity could have traveled into the man's body, insisting that, next time, better efforts should be made to weigh both animal and man before and after the procedure.

The crowd's skepticism was actually right on target. There is a strong possibility that little to no blood was actually transferred.
The distance between the donor animal and the recipient was often as big as a foot and a half. Any blood flowing through the tubes would cool quickly, and platelets that stuck to the sides of the device would obstruct the flow just as quickly as well. Moreover, the severity of a blood incompatibility reaction depends largely on the amount of incompatible blood transfused; the human body can handle a small bit of blood even as foreign as animal blood with just mild symptoms. If only a small amount of animal blood entered Coga's system, this would go a long way toward explaining why Coga and Denis' patients remained healthy after a procedure that could otherwise potentially have had serious complications and might even have been deadly. A mild reaction would also help to explain the brief fevers that Coga experienced following the earlier trial and, again, after this latest one. Royal Society members had, however, their own explanation for the fevers, which were “justly imputed to his disordering himself by intemperate drinking of wine.”
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The Royal Society had already made plans to perform a third experiment on the “extravagant” Arthur Coga. Lower's
De corde,
a treatise on blood transfusion that the surgeon published several years later, confirmed this: “In order to make further experiments on him with some profit also to himself, I had decided to repeat the treatment several times in an effort to improve his mental condition.” But to the Royal Society's great surprise and disappointment, Coga refused under protest that he had been transformed into a sheep. Writing under the name Coga the Sheep (
Agnus Coga
), he complained that the virtuosi had “transform'd him into another species” and left him penniless. Since their sheep's blood had caused “the loss of his own wool,” he explained that he would submit to future experiments only if the Royal Society would transform him entirely into a sheep
(“without as well as within”). The letter was signed: “The meanest of your flock.”
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When the heavy-drinking Coga claimed he been transformed into a sheep following his transfusions, he likely did it at the dictation of adversaries of the Royal Society, which was frequently mocked for its excessive enthusiasm for unconventional experiments.
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“The coffee-houses,” according to contemporary writer John Skippon, had “endeavored to debauch the fellow, and so consequently discredit the Royal Society and make the experiment ridiculous.”
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The playwright Thomas Shadwell similarly took comic aim at the transfusion experiments performed by the Royal Society in his satire
The Virtuoso
. The play's main character, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, tries their most famous experiments with comically disastrous results. Quoting portions of the transfusion reports published in the
Philosophical Transactions
nearly verbatim, Gimcrack replicates the Coga experiment in his own home. The results go beyond any of those described by Coga in his drunken revelries: Gimcrack “tranfus'd into a human vein 64 ounces of sheep's blood.” And his patient became “fully Ovine, or Sheepish; he bleated perpetually and chewed the Cud. He had wool growing on him in great quantities, and Northhamptonshire Sheep's tail did soon arise from his anus, or Human fundament.” The charlatan doctor resolves to make “a Flock” of human sheep. “I'll make all of my clothes from 'em,” he exclaimed, “'tis finer than a Beaver.”
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Men like Boyle, Lower, King, and Clarke pursued transfusion with focused seriousness, as part of an intellectual and scientific puzzle that demanded answers. Yet for others transfusion was still another comic example of the ways in which natural philosophers had pushed experiments beyond the realm of the practical
and into that of the ridiculous. Still, there seems to have been little outrage, at least in England, that transfusion was something morally corrupt or frighteningly wrong.

 

I
n France, of course, the reaction to such experiments could not have been more different. Transfusion, and more particularly Denis' experiments, had sparked angry reactions in the Academy of Sciences and the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Denis' experiments were nothing short of heretical, given the deep intersections between alchemy, transmutation, and Protestant approaches to medicine. At the very least Denis' imitation of the English was treasonous. An untalented imitator of the Royal Society, his detractors claimed, Denis had proved his allegiance to English science, rather than that of his fellow countrymen. And as Claude Perrault proclaimed, the transfusionist was clearly “prejudiced by the authority of the foreigners who had approved of transfusion.”
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But for Denis the publicity his experiments brought was much more important than originality, the advancement of science, or national allegiance.

Both Denis and Montmor were eager to continue building their reputation in Paris as contrarian outsiders to the king's nascent Academy of Sciences and the traditionalist Faculty of Medicine. To do so Denis stayed happily in copycat mode. The English had transfused the mentally ill Coga with sheep's blood. And now Denis began preparations to transfuse the legendary madman of Paris: Antoine Mauroy.