Blood Work (22 page)

 

T
ransfusion was, of course, hardly the best choice of vehicle to reach such lofty goals. The very idea of transfusion flowed from theories and practices that, in Catholic France, were simply untenable. William Harvey's discovery of circulation in the 1620s had set off a critical rethinking of medical philosophies that had endured since antiquity—and in many French circles these traditional modes of understanding the body still dominated. Later infusion and transfusion experiments relied as well on Cartesian theory, which had also been received with no small amount of prickliness among Parisian scientific, political, and religious elites. Descartes' dualist philosophy had emphasized the division
between body and soul. Notions that animal and human bodies were elaborate machines had been useful in scientific circles—not least in regard to providing new opportunities to perform research on live animals. Yet such arguments of a body-soul divide flew in the face of the most important traditional teaching of all: the Bible. To imagine transfusion meant to dismiss biblical dictates such as in Deuteronomy 12:23, “Eat not the blood, for the blood
is
the life.” And for the French, the fact that the concepts of blood circulation and transfusion originated across the Channel in the camps of their heretical Protestant enemies the English only confirmed their resistance.

Denis' attempts to build a reputation on the new science of transfusion were clearly doomed from the beginning. The parliament's verdict on transfusion was similarly predetermined. Nonetheless Denis' appeal was given full consideration—at least in appearance. Arguing on behalf of Denis and transfusion was none other than Chrétien de Lamoignon, son of the highest-ranking member of parliament, the Honorable Guillaume de Lamoignon. Working from the investigation reports and testimony from the Châtelet hearing, the young Lamoignon made the case for Denis, and transfusion more generally, before the presiding judge, Matthieu Molé. Judge Molé was himself the son of the man who had preceded Lamoignon's father as first president of parliament. In other words, Denis' case as well as that of transfusion more generally was heard not only in the highest court in France but also by some of its most illustrious members. According to the short and only report we have of the hearing, Lamoignon's arguments to Molé were said to have been a “masterpiece.”
²¹
Yet during the hearing surprisingly few questions were asked about the details of any possible plot against Denis, and there was no discussion at all of the
potential identity of a man or men who helped Perrine hasten her husband's death. Clearly the fate of transfusion was the sole issue at stake in this trial.

The verdict came swiftly. From his high-backed chair on the court's central podium, the judge demanded silence. He stared dispassionately at the nobles, physicians, and lawyers who returned the gaze with respect and anticipation. We do not know what Denis' thoughts were as he waited for Molé to make his proclamation. But if he was not yet fully humbled by this unequivocable show of the court's authority—and, by extension, the king's power—he soon would be. Molé declared that he saw absolutely no reason to overturn the Châtelet decision. Blood transfusion would now, and always, be performed only with the express approval of the Paris Faculty of Medicine. And like everyone else in attendance, Denis knew the faculty had no intention of ever allowing that to occur. The courts had spoken not once but twice. Transfusion was officially dead.

T
he Denis affair spelled the de facto end of transfusion not only in France but also in England. There is no evidence that the English officially banned the procedure.
¹
Yet there is little doubt that the declaration at the French parliament chilled transfusion research across the Channel and throughout Europe. Members of the Royal Society turned their focus on blood's other mysteries, such as its chemical properties, clotting mechanisms, and the source of its florid color. Rethinking the long-held belief that the heart's heat gave blood its color, Richard Lower performed simple experiments to show that arterial blood still remained red even when cooled, and that venous blood changed color when exposed to air. To prove this he exposed the trachea of a dog and capped it off. Soon the blood flowing in the arteries was “completely venous and dark in color.”
²
When the dog died, he pushed the venous blood through the dog's lungs, which had been perforated during the procedure. The blood turned bright red. Lower's questions on the importance of air and the lungs in blood set off a flurry of research
over the years that followed. Depending on one's view, this new direction either eclipsed the English fascination with transfusion or served as a welcome alternative to a procedure that was now more cloaked in controversy than ever before. As for France, no transfusions were performed there until the nineteenth century, and blood science once again took a backseat to mathematics, physics, and astronomy.

While most historians have left the story there, an important mystery still remains. Who helped Perrine Mauroy poison her husband? And why?

The answer can be found in a single letter that has long sat unnoticed in the archives. The seven-page document is titled simply “Reflections by Louis de Basril, Lawyer in Parliament, on Disputes Concerning Transfusion.” The document lacks a publisher's name, publication date, and documentation of royal permissions (
privilège
) normally required for publication. However, we do know that it was published before the trial at Parliament and possibly the one at Châtelet; a print excerpt of the letter was included in a 1668 collection, “Some New Observations on the Very Considerable Effects of Blood Transfusion.” The print run for the full-length letter itself was very small; only four libraries in the world own copies. All of this suggests that Basril's letter circulated as a loose-leaf pamphlet, perhaps surreptitiously. And for good reason. As Basril makes clear in his letter, transfusion debates had taken a hostile and dangerous turn. Everyone was looking over their shoulders, it would appear. If they were not, they should have.

Still, the otherwise little-known Basril felt compelled to speak out. He explained that his reasons for publicly revealing the identities of those behind the plot against Denis were not motivated by a wish to argue either for or against the procedure. Instead he believed “with all of his heart in the truth”—and
it was only through experimentation that such truths could be found. “In effect,” Basril explained, “because transfusion is the subject of so many disputes and animosities, it seems to me that, to proceed sincerely, those who have declared themselves against it would do better to perform experiments and to examine it in good faith.”

Details of Basril's life and status at parliament have been lost to history, but his words have not. In his revelatory letter Basril spoke calmly but firmly about the “indignation” that he felt toward those who “by ignorance or jealousy” worked to put an end to those experiments. Bristling over what he called the “cabal” against Denis, he named two men—Guillaume Lamy and Henri-Martin de la Martinière—for their involvement in the “secret intrigues” and “cowardly plots.”

While Martinière and Lamy's paths had not likely crossed before Denis' experiments, the two men shared a firm bond from the moment the transfusionist began his animal-to-human experiments. A footman had presented Martinière with a letter by Lamy denouncing transfusion immediately following a vivid dream about a philosopher who was transformed into a cow. And from that moment, Martinière shared a “friendship [with Lamy] that I have imprinted in my soul.”
³

There is little doubt that Lamy had been working assiduously to turn the opinion of the Paris Faculty of Medicine against Denis and transfusion. Barely days after Mauroy's death, on February 16, 1668, Lamy wrote another letter to the influential physician René Moreau. His tone was reflective and measured, but Lamy could not resist gloating over Denis' now-uncertain future. “I would like to think,” he crowed, “that…[Denis] saw in his imagination his reputation soaring and that all knowledgeable men would be praising his glory and miracles. But the human condition is subject to prompt change and marvelous vicissi
tudes. The miserable adventure of the madman's death will be enough to overturn all of his beautiful imaginations and to ruin entirely his high hopes.”
⁴

Lamy acknowledged in his letter that he and Denis had traded angry words in public. The University of Paris faculty member also acknowledged that there were lingering doubts among those in the medical world about whether he might have attempted to seek “vengeance against Monsieur Denis for having treated me so outrageously.”
⁵
In the wake of such accusations Lamy resolved publicly to abstain from any public discussion about the matter from this point forward. “I do not wish to debate this issue further with him. I will not write of it again, not out of fear of accusations but for my good rest and also because I think that I have said enough.”
⁶
Lamy kept his resolution until his death, it appears. And in the absence of other documents that would support Basril's accusations, it is difficult to say with confidence what Lamy's precise role may have been in assisting Perrine Mauroy in her dark deeds.

 

B
ut there is no lack of historical evidence in the case of Martinière. While Lamy remained quiet, Martinière spilled copious amounts of ink proclaiming his innocence. But a paper trail followed him, and it implicated him directly in the death of Mauroy. As a devout Catholic, Martinière made no secret of his belief that transfusion corrupted both bodies and souls. A man with a decidedly colorful history, Martinière agreed wholeheartedly with the Paris Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Sciences about the pernicious effects of transfusion. However, he was furious that Denis' research had been allowed to continue seemingly unchecked in the days and weeks preceding the Mauroy transfusions. Verbose and prone to passionate outbursts. Martinière fired off countless letters to any person he thought might listen.

For as powerful as Louis XIV had become, the pirate-turned-
physician felt that Denis needed to answer to still another power—one even more commanding than the Sun King himself: God. Any notion of an immaterial soul, he argued venomously, was “ridiculous” and sacrilegious.
⁷
He shared this view with Lamy. Similarly rejecting Cartesian mind-body dualism, Lamy believed, like most of his colleagues at the university, that the human soul was corporeal.
⁸
Martinière went one step further, arguing that blood was the precious fluid that created a “harmonious link between the soul and the body.”
⁹
For Martinière both transfusionists and Protestant alchemists were cut from the same cloth. Each tried to bring about unholy transformations. Alchemists transmuted metals. Transfusionists transmuted souls.
¹⁰

Like the fears of hybrid monsters that Martinière nursed since his pirate days, so too did his scorn of alchemists come from personal experience. After his release from captivity on the corsair ships, he made his way through Portugal and Italy before ending his travels in France. Along the way he sojourned for two months in Milan, where he earned his keep by working for an alchemist. His job was suffocatingly hot and backbreaking. As a
souffleur
(puffer) he kept the fires burning as his master tried desperately to unlock chemical arcana. He watched his master's greedy quest for wealth, power, and eternal life—and then he snapped. “After having puffed three days and three nights with someone without accomplishing anything but wasting our time, our fuel and all of our lead, I took a bat,” he explained, “and smashed all of the furnaces, kettles, alembics, and cauldrons. I swore that I would never again pursue the mad search for the so-called Philosopher's Stone.”
¹¹

Martinière wrote a series of similar battle cries against transfusion between Mauroy's first two procedures in December 1667 and the fatal third one during the week of February 15, 1668. He described dreams in which he saw himself taking on with courageous pride and violence the monsters created by transfusionist
transformations. In one he claimed to have seen a Chimera, a monstrous beast with “the head of lion, the tail of a dragon, the stomach of a goat” along with other composite parts of beasts and humans. The monster “infected all parts of the earth where it roamed spewing pernicious venom.” Transfusion, he explained, was Satan's work and solely responsible for resurrecting this and mythical monsters. “I believed,” Martinière wrote, “that time had buried [them]…but Satan, enemy of the human race, on the pretext of charity, reignited them through vain hopes of [transfusion's] usefulness.”
¹²

FIGURE 22:
An alchemical laboratory. Young men were frequently employed as “puffers” (
souffleurs
), responsible for keeping fires burning underneath the alchemist's experiments. Phillip Galle (sixteenth century).

In the dream Martinière readied his weapons to strike the beast. As he did, “a quantity of learned men” surrounded him.
They menaced him and threatened him until he ran away in surrender, fearful for his life. Moments later, the physician related, Athena herself—goddess of wisdom—arrived. Holding a large javelin in her hand, she impaled the monster and then beat it violently with a club until it died. Reflecting on his dream, Martinière vowed never to run away from his responsibilities again. He would stare the transfusionists straight in the eye. And then he would destroy them.

Over the nights that followed Martinière claimed to have been visited again by another mythic personage. This time he had a vision of Medea, the murderous transfusionist of antiquity. “I saw in the sky a woman in a chariot,” Martinière claimed. “She looked at me with angry eyes and hissed, ‘If my charms are not strong enough to convince you to give up your resolve to abolish transfusion, I will rip you apart [as I did] my brother and the children that I had with Jason.'” The physician turned indignantly to the sorceress. “It is you, execrable Medea, deadly witch!” he cried bitterly. “Despite your threats, I promise you that I will never give up on my dedication to the public good. I will do everything in my power to expose your dark plans to the world.”
¹³

Taking a page from Medea's own playbook, Martinière made good on his promise. And so convinced was he of the righteousness of his cause that he made little attempt to hide many clues that implicated him in Mauroy's murder. In a treatise he wrote on April 4, 1668, not long after the Châtelet hearing, Martinière confessed that he met at least once—when or where he does not say—with Perrine to discuss the transfusions that had been performed on her husband. He also confirmed that he encouraged Perrine to consider filing a formal complaint against Denis, although he wisely neglected to mention whether any money had changed hands in the process.
¹⁴
And tellingly, in the mass of documents related to Denis' work, it is Martinière alone who pro
vided the name of the apothecary, a Monsieur Claquenelle, from whom Perrine reportedly bought the ingredients for the powders she administered to her husband.

Thus it seems highly likely that Martinière counseled Perrine on what poison to use, how to acquire it, and how it should be administered. To be sure, Martinière was no stranger to the effects of various herbs and their poisonous potential. His first task in every port of call, as the sole doctor on a pirate ship, had been to seek out apothecaries. He had also published a lengthy
Treatise on Antidotes
just a few years earlier—and to know antidotes one needed to know poisons. The bulk of Martinière's treatise focused on the complex preparation of “mithridate,” which many herbalists and apothecaries claimed to be something of a magical cure-all. Martinière's own recipe for mithridate contained more than forty different substances—including rose leaves, myrrh, and powdered extract of beaver tail glands.

The mixture was named after the second-century BC Greek king Mithradates VI, who was rumored to have hardened himself against poison by means of a mysterious and virtuous potion that the king researched throughout his reign. This antidote—and his obsession—earned him the title “poison king.” He was infamous for testing his poisons, as well as his antidotes, on prisoners. At elaborate banquets prisoners condemned to death would be publicly fed poison-laced food or shot with poison-dipped arrows while the king narrated their symptoms to the crowd. When death was near, the prisoners were dragged away and used as guinea pigs to test the king's antidotes.
¹⁵
Martinière likewise observed without hesitation that poison, death, and doctoring went hand in hand. “I know,” he argued, “that homicide by doctors is allowed.”
¹⁶